


Never Grow A Wishbone

by ShanaStoryteller



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Draco pov, HP: EWE, Language is cultural, M/M, Monthly updates, No character bashing, Politics, Post War, Professor!Harry, Slow Build, Slytherins Aren't Evil, Unreliable Narrator, VERY UNRELIABLE NARRATOR, War is Complicated, mostly politics a little everything else, or more realistic than fic usually has, professor!draco, realistic politics, which fills a lot of people with anger i guess, which isn't what i intended but it's what we got
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-12
Updated: 2018-08-06
Packaged: 2018-08-14 14:30:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 49,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8017603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShanaStoryteller/pseuds/ShanaStoryteller
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She almost smiles, and true alarm starts to build in his chest. “I’m afraid I’m not here for something so small. Professor Roberts has resigned.”</p><p>“Good,” Draco says honestly, “Would you like a list of suitable alternatives? I know a number of competent potions masters abroad, but then of course you’d have to hire another teacher to act as the Slytherin head. I’m afraid you’ve dried up all the half decent Slytherin Potions masters.”</p><p>“Not all of them,” she says quietly.</p><p>He blinks. She can’t be serious. “You can’t be serious.”</p><p>“Gravely,” she says, “Mr. Malfoy, I am not above begging.”</p><p>What the bloody fuck. “I don’t even like potions!”</p><p>~</p><p>Draco returns to Hogwarts. </p><p>He has a duty to his blood and his name and his house, and he will fulfill it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i didn't mean to write this, and yet here we are. yolo
> 
> title is from Clementine Paddleford: “Never grow a wishbone, daughter, where your backbone ought to be.”

It’s early summer when Draco returns from an extended business trip to Germany. So when there’s a guest at the manor door, he’s expecting it to be any number of acquaintances wanting a piece of his time now that he’s back in Britain. Someone who wants his money, who think he owes him money, someone under his family branch needing his help, or maybe even just one of his friends. But instead one of his house elves, Milly, pops into his rooms and says, “Headmistress Minerva McGonagall to see you, Master Draco.”

He stares at her for a moment, hoping that maybe she’ll say she misspoke, but she doesn’t. McGonagall in his house can’t be anything good. At least his parents are in France. “Show her to the sitting room,” he orders, and Milly disappears with a pop. He’s twenty four years old and it’s absolutely ridiculous of him, but he still checks his hair and appearance before going out to meet her. He’s stopped wearing black robes since the war, so the dark green will have to do, regardless of the pointed comments it always gets about his house allegiance. McGonagall wore green robes throughout most of his schoolyears, so hopefully she won’t have anything to say about it.

He adjusts his cufflinks as he steps into the sitting room. She looks the same as ever – all thirteen years he’s known her, and she hasn’t changed at all. “Mr. Malfoy,” she greets, inclining her head.

“Headmistress,” he returns, crossing the room to stand in front of her. Neither of them move to sit, and he doesn’t suggest it. “To what do I owe the pleasure? I usually just get an owl when it’s time for alumni donations.” 

She almost smiles, and true alarm starts to build in his chest. “I’m afraid I’m not here for something so small. Professor Roberts has resigned.”

A no name halfblood who had been five years ahead of Draco in school. He can’t say he’s surprised – the curse on the Defense Against the Dark Arts position may have died along with Voldemort, but ever since keeping the potions position filled has been almost as difficult.

“Good,” he says honestly, “he was hardly qualified, either as a Potions master or as head of house. I’m not sure what exactly that has to do with me.” She just stares at him. He raises an eyebrow. “Would you like a list of suitable alternatives? I know a number of competent potions masters abroad, but you’re going to have to hire another professor to act as the Slytherin head. I’m afraid you’ve dried up all the half decent Slytherin potions masters.”

“Not all of them,” she says quietly.

He blinks. She can’t be serious. “You can’t be serious.”

“Gravely,” she says, “Mr. Malfoy, I am not above begging.”

What the bloody fuck. “I don’t even  _like_  potions!” If he was going to take any position, he’d much prefer it be Flitwick’s.

“That didn’t stop you from getting formally recognized as a Potions master,” she says, “nor listing it on your letter head.”

“My family deals with  _plant trading_ ,” he snarls, hating how quickly she’s managed to rid him of his calm façade, but unable to do anything about it. “Since I wasn’t about to start giving a fuck about herbology, I needed to be a potions master! Look, Headmistress, I’ll be lucky if I get a seat in government by the time I’m forty, and the war did a nice job of putting a significant dent in the fortune my family has been building for  _hundreds of years_. Not to mention half the morons supervising our stocks and business trades got themselves killed in the war, so I’ve spent the past seven years managing the Malfoy estates on my own.” He glares and crosses his arms, “So I really, truly don’t have time to play teacher at Hogwarts.”

She hasn’t looked away this whole time, still with that same unnervingly even gaze that he remembers from school. “This past year we only had four first year Slytherins. If something is not done soon, I’m afraid that number will go down to zero. I don’t just need a Potions master, Mr. Malfoy. I need a Slytherin. A  _real_  Slytherin.”

“There hasn’t been a Slytherin head of house born from a Slytherin family in over fifty years,” he tosses back, even though his heart is thudding in his chest. Only four first years? “Slughorn was fine, but he didn’t come from an old family. He faked it well enough, he did his job, but he wasn’t one of us. Snape wasn’t either, of course, and he was only barely serviceable. Nothing need to be said of the string of disasters you’ve hired since. You lot have done this to yourselves.”

“I know,” she says, and for the first time since he’s known her she looks older, “I know. Draco, you were a leader at school and a leader during the war,” that’s a generous description for what he was during the war, “and I need you to be a leader with this. They need you. Don’t abandon them now.”

“I fought on the other side of the war in case you’ve forgotten,” he says acidly. He doesn’t appreciate poor attempts at emotional manipulation, and frankly he expected better from her. “I’ve spent the years since the war returning my family’s reputation to what it once was, and while  _abroad_  the Malfoys are what they’ve always been, I don’t think anyone in Britain will be thrilled with my appointment.”

“I don’t care,” she says, and it’s a struggle to keep the surprise off his face. “I do not care. No one else can do this, and it needs to be done.  _Please_.”

Draco only barely keeps himself from sneering. “Headmistress, the war may be over, but if something isn’t done there  _will_  be another one. When this war ended it was about torture and power and killing one annoyingly unkillable boy. But that’s not how it  _began_.”

“The Blood Laws,” she says, and surprise colors her voice. “You support them?”

“Don’t you?” he throws back, “If they’d been passed, Voldemort not only wouldn’t have come to power, he wouldn’t even exist. But thanks to this war, no one can touch the Blood Laws without getting the accusation of Death Eater hurled at them. It will do what it always does, building and getting worse until someone snaps, and then we’ll have  _another_ war.”

“And you think you can stop it?” she asks, and she’s looking at him differently, like he’s not what she expected. Which is her own fault, really – Draco’s always considered himself to be rather transparent. Unfortunately.

He shrugs, “I think I’m the only one who can. Old blood will follow old blood, and who else is going to do it? Those of us who survived the war are still hurting, and aren’t exactly eager to fight again. And those of us on your side won’t risk their position by trying to reintroduce the legislation in an environment where they know it won’t pass. I’m going to spend the rest of my bloody life trying to get a seat in government that without the war I would already have. So, once again, I  _really_  do not have the time to play teacher at Hogwarts.”

He expects that to be the end of it, that McGonagall will write him off for a lost cause like she always has and Draco can go back to the exhausting work of trying to singlehandedly restore his family’s position.

Instead, she nods in that sharp, exact manner she has, and says, “Very well, Mr. Malfoy. If you accept my offer and become head of Slytherin house and our potions master, I will personally recommend you for a seat at the Wizengamot this time next year.”

Draco’s eyes widen. If she supports him, if the purebloods in power and the moderates who stand with him know that they won’t be demonized for confirming his seat, then it’s almost certain he will get it. “You – you’re serious?”

“I’ll take an Unbreakable Vow,” she says, and this is possibly the strangest day of Draco’s life. “Accept my offer, Mr. Malfoy.”

He runs a hand through his hair, messing it up thoroughly. Being a professor at Hogwarts is a prestigious, sought after position, and it will do more to repair his reputation than all the last seven years combined. But it’s also going to be difficult and miserable, and he doesn’t actually like children. “Fine,” he bites out, “on one condition.”

“I’ve already talked to Filius,” she says promptly. “He’ll be delighted to take you on as an apprentice.”

He blinks. “Is the all knowing thing something that gets passed on when you become head of Hogwarts?”

She smiles, and he hadn’t noticed the tension she was carrying until it was gone. “It’s always been your favorite subject, and you’ve registered over a dozen new charms with the patent office since graduating.” She hesitates, but says, “During the Triwizard Tournament, those dreadful buttons you made had Filius nearly floating he was so excited. He said it was the best charms work he’d seen from a fourteen year old since he himself was that age. When I say that he’ll be delighted to take you on, that is in fact a direct quote.”

Draco resists the urge to rub at his temples. At least it won’t be a total loss. He really does love charms. Besides, he would endure much worse for a Wizengamot seat. “Very well, Headmistress. Consider me hired.”

“Please,” she says, “call me Minerva. We are colleagues after all.”

~

Because McGonagall is far more cunning than she seems, the very next day the Prophet runs a story about his upcoming appointment as Potions master and the head of Slytherin house. If he truly is to do this properly, he’s going to have to  _thoroughly_  attend the party circuit this summer, and not just hit the usual ones. At least Pansy will be happy.

“HAVE YOU LOST YOUR BLOODY MIND?” Pansy screeches.

Pippy discreetly appears at his elbow and hands him four fingers of Scotch. Maybe all these blasted house elves are good for something. “Not exactly, no.”

Blaise is standing at the other end of the room because he’s a coward. “She’s got a point.”

“I thought you  _liked_  our arrangement,” he complains. “Twice the parties and dinners means twice the amount of stupidly expensive dresses I pay for.”

Pansy crosses her arms and scowls, “Being your marriage deterrent is in fact one of the highlights of my social career. That doesn’t mean I’m willing to send you off to Hogwarts like a lamb to the slaughter.”

“Don’t you think you’re being a touch dramatic?” he asks, “Just a smidge?”

“No,” she answers. “I’m really, really not. You’ll be the only Slytherin professor, and everyone knows what you did during the last war. You won’t have your business contacts, your international friends, even your damn money won’t do you any good in those halls. They’ll tear you apart.”

“Well, I can’t have that.” He downs half his glass in one go. “There were only four Slytherin first years last year.”

“Total?” Blaise says, incredulous. Pansy’s mouth is parted in surprise.

“Total,” he confirms, and the weight of the mess he’s agreed to clean up makes him want to say fuck it and hide in France with his parents. “I’m a Malfoy and a Black, and I have a duty to fulfill to my blood. I will fulfill it. The only question here is,” he turns to address the both of them, “Are you going to help me or not?”

Blaise rolls his eyes. “Of course we are, don’t be daft. Are you sure you want the goblins running your businesses and stocks again? There’s a reason your grandfather took over the account from them. They’ll take a fortune in fees.”

“I can afford it,” he says dryly. When he’d found out he’d been named the heir to a half dozen dark families, it had surprised him, but it shouldn’t have. They’re all related somehow, and leaving everything to the Malfoys, a family that has weathered the brunt of over a dozen wars, must have made sense to them. “Besides, it’s worth it to know my business isn’t being mishandled in my absence.”

Pansy runs a hand through her hair, forgetting she’s braided it and halving to yank it out halfway down. “Fine. You’ve clearly already made up your mind.”

Blaise smiles the beautiful, empty smile that he learned from his mother.  Draco hates that smile. “Let’s go to the ball.”

~

Draco attends every dinner and dance he’s invited to, either Pansy or Blaise on his arm. If he’d had any doubts about his decision before, he doesn’t now. Families who’d been downtrodden by the war speak to him with a gleam in their eyes and a centuries old confidence falling over their shoulders once more. He’s introduced to a number of his future students, and they’re all wary of him. For some, he’s the third head of house they’ve been introduced to.

What sticks out to him, what really sticks out to him, is meeting young Raina Lestrange. He’d inherited a Lestrange manor from Bellatrix and a couple of house elves, and he’d offered the lot back to the head of the family, the ancient Lady Rosamond, but she’d refused.

She hadn’t been the only one. Smart families didn’t want properties that had belonged to infamous death eaters. If they’d been ancestral homes that would have been different, but no one was foolish enough to leave Draco any of those properties, thank merlin.

He’s at a garden party taking place at the Lestange Castle, old and well maintained. War or no war, the Malfoys and Letranges had been allies since before their families moved to Britain, and Draco  _always_  accepts any invitation from them if he’s in the country. It wouldn’t do any good to allow the war to break family ties that have been in place for over a dozen generations. Pansy is busy so Blaise is his date to this event, wearing pale lilac robes that are a stark contrast to his dark skin. Draco  _cannot_  pull off pastels with his complexion, so he he’s in navy robes that offset the light purple perfectly. Every eye in the room is drawn to them, Blaise especially, and Draco can’t blame them.

He mixes and mingles, and these sorts of parties are casual and exclusive enough that he doesn’t have to always be on his guard, that he can actually enjoy the good food and wine and conversation. “Draco,” a smoke rattled voice says from behind him, and his smile is entirely genuine when he turns to face Rosamond Lestrange. There’s a girl hiding behind the older woman, and all he can see of her is one dark eye and black hair.

“My lady,” he greets, inclining his head. “A delight, as always. I trust you know my companion, Blaise Zabini?”

Blaise, the dramatic flirt, beams and kisses the back of Rosamund’s hand. She’s too smart for that to work, but she is amused by him, so Draco supposed she’s charmed either way. This is why he brings Blaise places.

“Of course,” she says. She’s older than Dumbledore, but there’s nothing but razor sharp intelligence in her eyes. “I just wanted to say how absolutely delighted we all are with your recent career move, Draco.” Before he has the chance to thank her, she pushes the small, pale girl with inky black hair in front of him. “This is my grand nephew’s daughter, Raina. She’ll be a third year.”

Draco is not good with children, but he’s not a barbarian, so he smiles and drops on a bended knee so he can look up into the girl’s in the eyes. The least he can do is give her the height advantage since she’s clearly nervous. But when he gets a good look at her, she seems  _afraid_  of all things, and he’s so taken aback by it that he forgets to say anything. But she swallows and says, “Hello Lord Malfoy. It’s very nice to meet you.”

“You as well,” he says, recovering and making his smile gentle. He leaves his hands crossed over his knee where she can keep an easy eye on them. “There’s no need to call me Lord Malfoy, however, I must insist on Draco. Although I suppose once the school year starts it’ll have to be Professor.” He winks at her and her lips turn up into something that’s almost a smile.

“It’s really true then?” She takes a step closer to him, “You really are coming back to Hogwarts? Even though – with – with everyone else that’s there?”

He knows who she’s referring to. “It’s hard to fear someone when you’ve seen them at eleven falling off their broom,” he says dryly, and it’s a lie, but it’s an important one. “Yes, of course I’m returning to Hogwarts. It’s time someone of merit was in the position, don’t you think?”

“Yes!” she says, so excitedly he’s surprised by it. She’s beaming at him, a very different girl than the one he met a few moments ago. “I’ll study very hard for the rest of the summer, and I’ll be your best Potions student,” she promises, and something hard settles at the base of his throat.

“I’m looking forward to it,” he says, and he knew what he was, a direct line from Black and Malfoy, old blood, Slytherins for generations on both sides. He’d known what that would mean to everyone else, but he hadn’t considered what it would mean to the children.

She curtsies to him and her aunt, and then scampers away back over to her parents, talking quickly and pointing over to him. “You understand?” Rosamond asks, looking at him intently.

“Yes,” he answers, and he doesn’t resent her for this. It was a necessary lesson, delivered in the kindest and most effective way she could. “Thank you.”

The rest of party moves quickly after that, adults and cautious children alike coming up to congratulate him on his appointment. Blaise remains a charming and supportive presence at his elbow.

At the end of the night, he walks Blasé back to their carriage, a proprietary hand on the small of his back. “I can’t just quit after a year or two,” he says grimly. “If I’m going to actually make real change, I’m going to have stick around. Damnit.”

There are still people watching them, so Blaise leans against his side and kisses his cheek before allowing Draco to help him into the carriage, using their closeness to say quietly enough that no one else can hear him, “Looks like you’re fucked, mate.”

Draco restrains himself from laughing until he follows Blaise into the carriage, but only barely.

~

Draco has spent most of his day arranging his accounts and signing them over to the goblins, and this morning he’d finally popped over to France to inform his parents of what was happening. His father was doing better, but hadn’t really understood.

His mother hadn’t said anything. The war had stolen something from all of them, but sometimes Draco feels like it’s his mother who lost more than his father. Narcissa had been the youngest of the indomitable Black sisters, gorgeous and educated, and she’d married the heir to the Malfoy family, a man who’d been handsome and powerful and had treated her with a kindness that their marriage had not required he provide. She’d been a society queen, every bit as cunning and intelligent as Lucius, and ferociously in love with her life, a perfect wife and doting mother. With Bellatrix in Azkaban and Andromeda married to a muggle, she must have felt like she’d escaped some terrible fate.

Narcissa had done everything right and fought to keep her family safe throughout it all, and she wasn’t  _unhappy_  in France with his father, but she wasn’t happy either. But she refused to return to Britain, refused to run the Malfoy Manor as would be her  _right_  until he married.

Between that visit and negotiating with the goblins, he’s beyond exhausted and just wants to collapse into bed. So, of course, that’s when Milly appears besides him and says, “Excusing me, Master Draco, but you have a visitor.”

“It’s nearly midnight!” he snaps. Milly’s ears droop, and he takes a deep breath before asking, “Who is it?”

“It is Mistress Lovegood, Master Draco,” she says quietly.

Of  _course_  it’s Loony. Who else would come knocking at his door in the middle of the night without a care in the world? “Let her in,” he says wearily. He’s not going to bother making himself presentable for her. She  _had_  attended family dinners until her mother died, after all. It’s not like she’s going to care if his robes are ruffled or his hair mussed.

By the time he walks into the sitting room, Luna is sitting upside-down on the couch with her legs thrown over the back and her long blonde hair piled on the floor. A cup of tea floats besides her, still faintly sparking with elf magic. “Cousin!” she greets, beaming at him.

She’d stopped calling him that before their Hogwarts years, and had only started again after the war. He wishes she’d stop. “Sit like an adult,” he says, too tired to sound more than vaguely disapproving. “What are you doing here?” He asks hopefully, “Do you want your mother’s house back? The house elves have been taking care of it but, I must reiterate, I truly have no use for a house in Japan.” He doesn’t even do business there.

“Oh, no, you can keep it. Sell it if you don’t want it,” she somersaults over the edge of the couch so she’s standing in front of him. “McGonagall told me that you’re going to be the Potions professor! Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I can’t sell the house,” he says, offended on behalf of Pandora, a woman he honestly hadn’t even liked all that much while she was alive, and he’s pretty sure the feeling was mutual. He has no idea why she’d left it to the Malfoy family and not – well no, he doesn’t suppose he’d trust Xeno with a family home either. “Four generations of your mother’s family lived in that house, don’t be ridiculous.”

“Fine, keep the house,” she shrugs. “Cousin, you’re coming to Hogwarts! We’ll be able to see each other every day!”

Merlin, he regrets this decision already. “I suppose,” he says. “Also, McGonagall released an official notice of my appointment to The Daily Prophet over a month ago. It hasn’t exactly been a secret.”

“You know I don’t read the Prophet,” she says reproachfully. “You should have sent me an owl!”

“Luna.” He can already feel a headache building behind his eyes. She has, for the record,  _always_  been this exasperating. “Is there a reason you came here in the middle of the night? I can’t imagine any of your friends are happy that you’re here. Is there some duty as head of the family you need me to perform? Would you like a house in Britain? I have enough of them.”

She quiets, her dark blue eyes going soft with hurt. Talking to her has always been a minefield – she hadn’t been hurt when he’d teased her all through Hogwarts, not really, but here they are having a perfectly normal adult conversation, and now she’s upset. Honestly. “We are family, aren’t we?” she asks quietly. “It shouldn’t matter what my friends think.”

“Your father can’t like it either,” he says, feeling quite out of his depth. He really doesn’t understand why she bothers talking to him. Her father has always been happy to pretend his mother hadn’t been born a Malfoy. She keeps staring at him, air tinged with sadness, and he rolls his eyes. “ _Yes_ , Luna, we’re family. I’d hardly let anyone else into the manor uninvited and unexpected, now would I?”

She smiles at him, too large and ridiculous, and he quirks his lips back in return. She may be ridiculous and crazy, but she’s also his cousin, and in between all the crazy she’s almost nice to be around. “Do you want to hear about the interesting students?” she offers. “Since they’ll be your students too.”

He is  _exhausted_  and he’s sure all of Luna’s information will be spectacularly unhelpful, like what their favorite colors are and which ones are being stalked by creatures he doesn’t believe exist. “I’d be delighted,” he says, snapping his fingers. In the next moment there’s a cup of steaming tea in his hands, and he kicks off his shoes to curl up at the end of the couch. Luna follows suit, tea still floating and growing cold beside her while she gesticulated wildly and begins a story about what sounds like a very strange Hufflepuff fifth year.

~

It’s two weeks before the start of the school year. He’s ordered the elves to pack up and deliver his belongings to his rooms, which he thinks is rather straightforward, but there’s a hesitant tugging on his pant leg. “Excuse me, Master,” Bip says, ears and eyes downcast. These are good elves, they never speak without being spoke to. Especially Bip – he was one of the Lestrange elves Draco had inherited.

“Yes?” He looks down at the elf, “What is it?”

“We was just wondering,” he keeps his eyes lowered, “if there will be anything you’ll be needing us elves to be doing while you’re gone? Anything at all?”

Fuck. He hadn’t thought about the elves. The Malfoys have always employed about a dozen elves to manage their properties, but after the war he’d inherited about fifty more. Granted they also came with numerous properties, but one elf per property was more than enough if it wasn’t being used. To be honest, it was overkill. One skilled elf could easily maintain five out of use properties with time to spare. There was enough latent magic around the manor and some of the other homes he’d inherited that they weren’t in any danger of starving, but they’d need something to do. Something around people –

Or children. Messy, demanding, hungry children.

“Bip, gather all the elves that can be spared from general duties,” he commands, “You’re all coming with me to Hogwarts.”

The poor thing looks so excited Draco’s almost worried he’s going faint. “Yes, Master Draco! Right away, Master Draco!”

He rubs the back of his neck, then goes to go draft a letter to Minerva. He’s sure there’s going to be plenty of parents pissed about this latest decision, but he really can’t find it in himself to care. The only thing worse than a happy house elf is a morose one – he had met Kreacher, after all, and that was the saddest excuse for a house elf he’d seen since they’d employed Dobby.

~

He trusts the elves to make his rooms livable, but Draco’s going through the potions classroom. He’s sure there are a few of them familiar enough with the art that they could clean it without killing themselves, but he’s not willing to risk it. It’s one thing to hit an elf for failing its duty, and quite another for one to die for following orders while under his employ.

If he wasn’t convinced that the previous potions professors had been worthless before, trying to get the classroom in order would have done it. The ingredients are stored in completely the wrong sequence. What moron kept lion’s mane next to murtlap essence? If something spilled, then the whole thing would explode. Before he can even begin to deal with that mess, he has to clean the whole classroom. There are numerous potions stains, and if he knew what they were then he could use magic to get rid of them, but he doesn’t. It’s not like he can just leave them there – all it takes is  _another_ potion spilling on the stains, and the wrong combination will end in an explosion. People truly underestimate how often potions end in explosions. So, unless he wants to risk blowing himself up, he’s going to have to do it by hand like a peasant. He snaps his fingers, and Milly appears in front of him. “A pail of water, boiling hot. Another pail, and at least three dozen rags.” She nods and his requested items appear besides him. “Very good. Dismissed.” She disappears, leaving him alone to his work.

He rolls up his sleeves and resigns himself to burning these trousers. With a swish and a flick, all the desks and chairs in the room rise to the ceiling. The water’s temperature never falls below steaming. Hours later, he’s completed about two thirds of the classroom, his hands have turned some horrid yellow color, and he’s identified at least seven of the failed potions on the ground. Lovely.

“Draco,” an amused voice says behind him, “I hope we’re not interrupting.”

He doesn’t look up from his scrubbing, “You are, actually, Minerva. What kind of morons did you have in here? Or are all the students as competent as Longbottom? It’s the only explanation for how the floor is this much of disaster.” He pauses. She’d said ‘I hope  _we_ ’re not interrupting.’

He looks up, hoping it’ll be Flitwick. He’s not nearly so lucky. “Harry was quite insistent he greet you as soon as you arrived,” McGonagall says dryly. She hadn’t told Draco about the meltdown Potter had on hearing of his appointment, but Draco is confident he had one.

Harry is staring at him like he’s never seen him before. He looks good, the bastard. His gorgeous copper skin is the darkest it’s ever been, and it’s a lovely contrast to his bright green eyes. His stupid muggle clothes doing nothing to hide he’s just as fit as back when they were on the quidditch pitch during school. Not that Draco  _isn’t_ , but he’s also on his hands and knees scrubbing the floor like a servant and absolutely filthy. “Potter,” he says, raising an eyebrow. “While I’m touched that your heart’s all aflutter over my presence, I am quite busy at the moment.”

“Uh,” he coughs, then flushes. “I – yes, I – sorry,” he finishes with before turning on his heel and – Draco cannot believe this –  _running away_.

He stares and then slides his gaze over to Minerva. “What the hell?”

 “That went quite well, I think,” she says.

He points an accusing finger at her, filthy rag still clenched in his fist. “Don’t you start scheming too. If that’s a tradition, it’s one you should break.”

She just smiles at him. It’s a new expression, and he’s still getting used to it. Draco doesn’t think she’d ever smiled at him before this whole mess began. “You know, heavier objects are harder to levitate, especially over time.”

He crosses his arms, and his crisp white shirt is covered with stains. It’s getting burned along with the trousers. “Yes, Minerva, I did pass my first year charms class, thank you for asking. There’s a reason children start out with a feather.”

She looks up at the ceiling, “How long have those been up there?”

He follows her gaze. All of the room’s furniture is still hovering toward the ten feet in the air. “I don’t know, however long I’ve been imitating a house elf. A couple of hours?” He scowls, “I am actually an accomplished wizard, in case you’ve forgotten.”

Draco expects her to snap at him for his attitude, but she just keeps smiling. “I haven’t forgotten,” she promises, then leaves him to his classroom.

What the fuck.

It takes him another hour to finish cleaning the floor and walls of suspicious stains. He lowers the furniture and intends to get started on it, but after a thorough once over he’s not sure it’s worth it. The tables are stained and scratched, with burn marks and strange splotches. The chairs aren’t in much better condition.

He taps his wand against his chin. He’s a fair hand at transfiguration, although it’s not his specialty. He could always call Pansy, who does rather have knack for it. But he’s also one of the richest wizards in the world, and half the reason he’s in this dreadful place is to make a statement. So he’ll make a statement. He snaps twice and two of his house elves appear before him. “Get rid of it,” he says, pointing to the furniture that his magic has neatly stacked against the wall. “Burn it, give it away, dump it in the ocean for all I care. But get it out of here.”

“Yes, Master,” they say as one, and in the next instant his classroom is bare. He’ll deal with that tomorrow. For now, he tackles the storage cupboard, which is going to take up nearly as much time as cleaning the bloody floor did. He has to entirely reorganize it, and half the ingredients are expired. No wonder there were so many potions stains. It’s a miracle any of them managed to make a complete potion with this to work with. At the end of it, his classroom is clean and the potions ingredients that are worth keeping are organized in a way that won’t kill anyone. It’s also nearly dinner time, so he goes to his own rooms next to the Slytherin dorms.

He steps inside and can feel the tension that had built up in his back loosening. It’s decked out just like home with smooth, ancient lines and a surprisingly pleasing palate of silver and deep purple. A house elf appears at his side, and he looks down and realized it’s Bip. “Very good,” he says, and the little thing puffs up in pride. “The potions classroom should be safe now. Give it a thorough cleaning, but if you see anything unusual, get me immediately.”

“Yes, Master Draco,” he squeaks before disappearing. The hearth is crackling pleasantly, casting a warm, cheery glow over the rooms. It’s not his country manor or his townhouse in France, but it’s not a bad place to call home.

The shower feels luxurious after the day cleaning. He steps out from under the warm spray of water and dries himself with a flick of his wand. He stands in front of the wardrobe, tapping his wand against his arm. Well, the elves did decorate his quarters in purple. Might as well keep with the theme. He slashes his wand forward, then pulls it quickly back. His wardrobe opens, revolving sets of clothes twirling past. He chooses what he wants with quick flicks of his wand, and when he leaves for the great hall he’s in a purple robe so dark it almost looks black and soft grey trousers.

He takes a deep breath before entering the great hall. Into the lion’s den he goes.

“Draco,” McGonagall says as soon as he enters, like she was waiting for it. “You’re looking much better.”

“Well it would be difficult for me to look worse,” he answers, wry. “By the way, I got rid of all the furniture from the Potions room, I couldn’t possibly work with something that outdated. I’ll arrange for replacements tomorrow.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Very well. It is your classroom.”

Draco feels like that was too easy, but it’s not like he wants to argue with her either, so he just nods his thanks and lets his eyes glide over the table. Potter, Granger, and Luna he expected, but not the man avoiding his eyes next to Pomona. “Longbottom,” he greets, gracefully taking his seat next to Filius, who winks at him. He hates himself for finding it comforting. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

“He’s my apprentice!” Sprout says cheerfully, “He’s just finished his studies with the McCains, and came seeking an apprenticeship. How could I refuse?”

Draco wrinkles his nose, unable to stop himself. Granger pounces on him instantly, all bushy brown hair and dark brown skin and flashing brown eyes. “Something to say, Malfoy?”

“The McCains are morons,” he answers readily, addressing Longbottom instead of Granger. The other man won’t meet his gaze. It’s like he’s talking to a house elf. “I’d do my best to forget whatever they taught you and just go by Sprout’s word.”

“They were a great help during the war,” Granger says archly, like that has any bearing on the conversation.

“That’s nice,” he says blandly. “Their gardens refuse to be tended by them anymore, so it’s only a matter of time before they go out of business. If they’re smart they’ll sell to someone who can salvage it before they become destitute.” He pauses, thinking for a moment, and then addresses Longbottom again. “Given your well known proclivity for the subject I assume they were all too eager to throw you at the problem. Much like smacking a bandaid on a stab wound.”

Granger’s red in the face, all ready to defend a family he’s sure she’s never had more than a quick conversation with. He fatalistically braces himself for impact, but instead of Granger’s yelling, Longbottom finally deigns to speak. “Well,” he says, almost smiling, “I did learn a lot.”

"That’s a fair point,” Draco says after a moment's consideration, “Did you end up setting the singing tulips on fire? That’s what I recommended when they came to me.”

“Why would the McCains go to you?” Granger asks. On one hand, he appreciates the older professors letting them have their little dick measuring contest without interfering, but on the other hand, he’s  _hungry_  and this is  _boring_.

“They tried to sell their estate to me,” he answers. “Unfortunately, I mostly deal abroad and have neither the time nor the inclination to maintain a greenhouse domestically. Too much fussy temperature work when you can just grow the stuff locally and smack a preservation charm on it.”

“Preservation charms aren’t as good as fresh product,” Longbottom says, and at least now he’s looking at him.

“No, of course not, but the difference is negligible most of the time. When it isn’t, people can always pay for a portkey transfer.” Longbottom winces. Portkey shipments don’t come cheap since the charm is such a pain to apply.

Granger inserts herself in the conversation. Again. “What about people that can’t afford the portkey fee?”

He raises an eyebrow and drawls, “Well, if they can’t afford the portkey transfer, then they certainly wouldn’t be able to afford the giant markup on product I’d have to make to maintain profits if I was also staffing enough herbologists to keep a tropical greenhouse in the middle of winter.” She opens her mouth to say something else irrelevant to the conversation, he’s sure, so he doesn’t give her the chance. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I for one am starving.” He snaps his fingers rapidly, five times a row, and by the time he’s done the food is set out and steaming in front of them.

Minerva takes a quick sip from her goblet to hide her laughter. Draco pointedly ignores everyone but Flitwick for the remainder of the meal. Luckily for Draco, he’s more than willing to be dragged into a conversation about the minutia and limitations of the portkey charm.

He feels the weight of someone’s gaze on him throughout the whole meal. He assumes it’s Granger, but when he looks up she’s deep in conversation with Longbottom.

However, out of the corner of his eye, he does see Potter jerk his head down so he’s staring at his plate.

Interesting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hope you liked it!
> 
> you can follow/ harass me at: shanastoryteller.tumblr.com


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter was so hard to write
> 
> note: i removed the platonic relationship tags not because they're inaccurate, but because its taking a while to get to them. i'll re-add them when they become developed in the story.

Diagon Alley is a step away from becoming muggle London at this point, so Draco doesn’t even waste his time by going there.

He takes the Floo straight to Borgin and Burkes, his highest quality robes sitting perfectly on his shoulders. They’re a blue as dark as the night sky, and the buttons all up the front charmed to give a subtle twinkle. If anyone were to look closely, different constellations can be seen chasing each other on the robe’s hem. It had been his mother’s, a family heirloom passed onto her from Great Aunt Walburga on her wedding day. His name is written in the stars like all the other Blacks, and he has as much of a right to wear this robe as any of his ancestors.

Also, his mother now rarely wore anything with a hint of color to it, instead choosing to cultivate an exclusively black wardrobe. He’d appropriated her wardrobe not long after the war ended, and she hadn’t said a word. He hasn’t yet been able to gather to courage and ask what, exactly, she was mourning.

“Lord Malfoy.” Borgin comes forward, a steeped old man whose eyes look too big behind his glasses. Draco reaches inside his cloak, fingers brushing against his wand so that he can banish the ash from the soles of his shoes.

“Borgin,” he greets, and the little old man unbends himself just a little, standing that much straighter as he blinks up at Draco. “I need some custom work done. I’m sure you can oblige? I’ll need Burkes’s expertise as well.” They may run an antique shop, but the couple also had a talent for magical craftsmanship. Borgin did the actual material shaping, while his husband was particularly skilled at seamless integration of opposing materials and locking and protection spells. It’s impossible to make a living off that, however, as even noble families bought things that were made the muggle way and then just charmed the finished product. It was exponentially cheaper, although the quality of course just wasn’t the same.

Draco pulls out his wand and summons the plans from his rooms at Hogwarts. It’s unnecessary and a waste of magic, but it’s not enough to just display his family and his wealth. Power is important too. Borgin glances through the schematics, eyebrows rising nearly to his hairline. “Of course, Lord Malfoy. However, it will be quite costly.”

“As superior arts should be,” he sniffs, and the sudden wash of pride looks  _good_  on Borgin, it makes him look like what he is – a powerful and respectable pureblood. “I need sixteen of them, and they must be delivered to me at Hogwarts by the end of the month. At the absolute latest.”

Borgin blinks, and Draco resists the urge to smirk. The end of the month is ten days away. To create sixteen of the desk in that timeframe, Borgin and Burkes will have to close the shop and work straight through. Draco estimates the whole thing will cost more than all the Weasleys make in a year, combined. Good.

“Absolutely, Lord Malfoy!” he says, displaying an enthusiasm that Draco doesn’t remember seeing in him since he was a child. “We’ll get started on this right away!”

“Excellent,” he says. “The goblins are handling my accounts.” Another way to display his wealth, since few people have the money to hire the operators of Gringotts. Fools, in Draco’s opinion. They were  _goblins_ , and somehow always managed to almost double his profits even after taking out their monstrous fee. He doesn’t know what his grandfather was thinking when he’d fired them. It’s not like they’d come under hard times. “Send the bill their way at your convenience.”

“Thank you, Lord Malfoy,” Borgin says, and it’s a touch too sincere to just be about Draco placing a large order.

Draco tucks his wand back in his robes, “Believe me, Borgin, the pleasure is mine.” He apparates out of there before the man can do something horrid, like smile at him.

He may be rich, but he’s not  _insane_ , so he orders the stools from a reputable craftsman in the upper alleys – hand made, but not magic made, and set to be delivered to his classroom in three days. He’s just considering if he should put in an appearance somewhere for lunch or head back to Hogwarts when an excited voice calls out, “Cousin! – Ow,  _Mum_ , I mean, Lord Malfoy!”

“Draco is fine,” he says dryly, turning on his heel to see Diane Goyle with a long suffering look on her face and surrounded by four children. He assumes the two are connected. Diane is his great aunt’s youngest daughter on his father’s side, if he’s not mistaken. Not that it matters – after a certain point, everyone just gets relegated to cousin to avoid the headache, and the only time anyone bothers to get specific is when arranging a marriage. “Diane, a pleasure.”

“Lord Draco,” she smirks, going into a neat curtsey that the children – including the boys – attempt to copy with varying levels of success.

“That’s not what I meant and you know it,” he says, because Diane is a  _brat_. Lucius had complained more than once that she and Draco were too similar for their own good. “School shopping?”

“Cousin!” He looks down, and Diane’s son Markel grabs his hand, tugging it until he obligingly bends enough to look him in the eye. “You’re going to be my head of house, that’s so cool!”

Draco frowns, “You’re not old enough for Hogwarts.”

Markel scowls and pokes Draco in the side with his  _very bony fingers_ , and Diane laughs because she’s a traitor. “I’m eleven!”

“Since when?” he demands.

“You were out of the country at the time,” Diane says, amused. “In Russia, I believe.”

“Oh, yes. That.” A patch of Devil’s Snare had become temperamental and started attacking its herbologists, which honestly is what they’d deserved for putting Devil’s Snare in the same plot as the gillyweed marshes. It had taken him two weeks to sort that mess out and hire a whole new team of herbologists that weren’t going to make his plants revolt against him. He says to Markel, “You better be on your best behavior. You’ll be representing both the Malfoy and Goyle families.”

“Marilyn can represent the Goyles,” he scoffs. “I’ll take the Malfoys.”

A tall girl that Draco knows to be the Goyle heir smacks Markel upside the head. It doesn’t faze him, so Draco assumes it’s a common occurrence. “You’re a disgrace to both families,” she tells him, “You’re lucky Uncle Warren doesn’t lock you in the basement like a squib.”

“Dad would  _never_ ,” Markel declares. “I’m his only son! His precious child! The light of his life!” A boy Draco is pretty sure is Luca Greengrass raises both his eyebrows, and he has to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling.

“Didn’t he threaten to attach you to the ceiling with a permanent sticking charm if you didn’t stop flying your broom into the rose bushes last week?” asks a girl Draco doesn’t recognize, although based on the stormy grey-blue eyes alone he assumes she’s an Ollivander.

“Listen,” Markel says passionately. “There is no reason for us to have ten foot tall rose bushes. None at all. They’re eyesores, just – just a blight on our good name. I was doing him a favor, really.”

Draco’s almost certain he made that exact same argument to his mother after one (or three, or four) too many run ins with the weeping willows on the property, which unlike muggle ones actually did weep, and did so  _extremely_   _loudly_  after Draco would fly into them and get caught in the branches. He trades a look with Diane, because she was a beater during school, and he would be  _shocked_  if she didn’t have a similar story. They have to quickly look away from each other before they burst out laughing.

“I was just heading out to lunch,” he says, interrupting the kids before a full scale argument can break out. “Would you like to join me?”

The children turn their faces up at him, like sunflowers. Then as one, they turn to Diane, who’s back to looking long suffering. “We’d be delighted,” she answers. Draco intends to offer her his arm, but instead Markel and Marilyn each grab one of his hands and drag him forward. Markel launches into a story about his latest flying excursion, causing Marilyn to roll her eyes. Luca interjects whenever he feels Markel is stretching the truth a little too much, but the Ollivander girl doesn’t say anything at all. She just keeps glancing at him with those oddly piercing eyes her family has.

Of course, as soon as they step out of Knockturn Alley, Diane’s face smooths out to ice, no long his older mischievous cousin, but Mrs. Goyle, a woman who may not have served Voldemort directly but certainly knew people who did, and did nothing to stop them.  The kids’ smiles slip from their faces and they let go of his hands, falling silent as they rearrange themselves so they’re walking a half step behind the adults.

Draco did the same as a kid, remembers clearing his face of emotions and walking in between and just behind his parents whenever they were out in public. But Draco did it out of a place of arrogance, was more than happy to stand there looking down at people older and taller and more powerful than him because he was the Malfoy heir.

It’s not the same.

~

He means to part ways with them after lunch, but somehow ends up getting dragged around the rest of the day to help with the kids’ school shopping. They do it all in Diagon Alley, and Diane doesn’t say anything, but Draco is sure before they bumped into each other that she was planning to do her shopping in Knockturn.

He doesn’t return to the castle until the moon is high in the sky. His robe is most beautiful at night, the constellations that sparkle along the hem during the day aren’t so confined under moonlight. They dance and twirl gorgeously across the rich blue fabric, and Draco is sure he looks like an idiot standing in front of the castle looking at his robe, but he can’t find it in himself to care. It’s the work of Aquila Black over three hundred years ago, and one of the most impressive charms he’s ever come in contact with. She’d spun the thread herself and had made the dye from burning tulips harvested on a three quarters moon, and then she’d woven the robe as a single garment from that thread. There wasn’t a single seam or stitch on it. The robe had over a hundred interlocking charms on it, so perfectly merged that even after three centuries not a bit of the spellwork had started to erode or fade. It was honestly easier to make an invisibility cloak than to replicate everything Aquila Black had done to make this robe.

Draco goes to his classroom, a reignited determination burning inside of him. History is important, family is important, and he’s not about to let a few pointless wars get in the way of over a thousand years of tradition.

~

A soft chiming noise wakes Draco up, low enough not to be jarring but persistent enough that he can’t ignore it and go back to bed. “Milly,” he groans, flinging an arm over his eyes, “I  _told_   _you_  not to wake me up today.”

“I is very sorry, Master Draco,” his house elf whispers, and he forces his irritation down because one of the worst ways to start a day is with a crying house elf. “But Headmistress McGonagall sent a message. You be having a meeting, Master Draco?”

“Not until eleven,” he says, and he wants to snap at her, but doesn’t. Maybe he should start having Bip wake him up. The older house elf wasn’t as nice about it, but he didn’t get upset over Draco’s morning attitude.

“It is eleven fifteen,” she says.

Draco throws off his comforter and grabs his wand, cursing. “Milly! You should have said that in the first place!” She looks at him with big liquid eyes and twists her ears back, and Draco wishes not for the first time that it was possible to use his magic on his own elves as he slaps her hands away. “Stop that. Make my bed and prepare my robes.”

Milly could complete both of those tasks with a single snap of her fingers, but instead she does it by hand while he quickly applies charms to his face and hair so he doesn’t look like a barbarian. He almost yells at her for wasting time before remembering she had been one of the Flint elves. They had a reputation of being rather – harsh, with their elves. There was a reason most of the creatures refused to work for their family anymore.

She lays out his silk Slytherin green robes, which are probably overkill for a staff meeting, but everything he does is overkill, so Milly probably has the right idea. “Very good,” he tells her before running out the door. He sees her wilt in relief out of the corner of his eye. Good.

He bursts into the meeting twenty five minutes late, robes billowing out behind him. “How nice of you to join us,” Minerva says, and before he would have taken it as a slight and said something acidic in return, but now he’s very aware that she’s  _laughing at him._

“Don’t you start,” he says crossly, taking the empty seat between Filius and Luna, “I’ve been up until dawn the past two nights gathering mourning thistles.”

Pomona raises an eyebrow and Longbottom gives him an odd look. “It’s the new moon.”

“Yes, that’s the point,” he huffs, snapping his fingers. A steaming cup of tea appears in front of him and Granger throws him a disgusted look. What’s the point of house elves if he has to make his own tea?

“Mourning thistles become poisonous when picked during the new moon,” Longbottom continues, like Draco is a simpleton. “That’s why they’re called mourning thistles. If you prick yourself on them, you’ll die.”

“Well, unfortunately for you lot, I’m not planning on it,” he says. “Dried mourning thistles picked on the new moon can then be crushed into powder. Which, when left in a golden bowl covered in an unbroken spider web under direct sunlight for thirteen days, becomes –”

“Poor Man’s Faerie Dust,” Longbottom finishes. “Merlin, that’s a lot of effort to go to. Doesn’t your family  _sell_ the stuff? For that matter, I know the Malfoy land has faeries on. You could gather the real thing easily enough.”

Granger’s looking back and forth between them so quickly he’s surprised she hasn’t given herself whiplash. Potter just looks confused. “If by easily enough you mean by trading my weight in blood for it, maybe.” Didn’t Longbottom get on with the half-giant oaf? No way Hagrid would have ever have suggested someone gather faerie dust alo – then again, he did smuggle a dragon and the acromantulas onto school grounds, so maybe he did. “Believe me, I would love nothing more than to sign a great big check on behalf of Hogwarts to myself for potions ingredients, but I’d be slapped with a lawsuit before the ink was dry. It’s a toss up whether it’d be for extortion or money laundering.”

“Why don’t you just continue buying them from wherever Hogwarts usually gets their ingredients?” Potter asks.

Draco sniffs, but before he can say anything, Pomona interjects. “And sign a check to his competition instead? I think not, Mr. Potter.” She looks to Draco, curiosity in her narrowed eyes. “Are you planning on growing all your own ingredients?”

“All the ones I can,” he says, doing his best not to show his surprise at her reaction. “I don’t sell frog livers or unicorn hairs and the ilk myself, so I have no problem buying them. There will be a few ingredients that I’ll have to buy outright simply because of time constraints, but I’ve already created an account with a supplier in Japan.”

“Why Japan?” Granger asks, and at the very least she doesn’t look like she has plans to murder him in his sleep anymore.

“Because  _I_  don’t sell in Japan, so at least I’m not giving money to my competition,” he says. “I can see the headlines now – ‘Malfoy Doesn’t Use His Own Product – What Dark Secrets Are His Peach Trees Hiding?’ It would be a nightmare.”

Someone snorts in laughter, and Draco is almost impressed when he realized it’s Longbottom. When he realizes everyone’s staring at him, his ears go red, “It – peach trees, get it? Because peach pit paste is the binding agent in the potion that – that sneakascopes get soaked in?” Longbottom looks at Draco, “That was the joke, right?”

“Yes, Longbottom, that was the joke.” Luna is looking at both of them and beaming. He wishes they were still kids so he could just steal her shoes whenever she got annoying.

Actually. He casually touches his hand to the wand hidden in his sleeve, and this charm is tricky to pull off without the wand movements, but – almost – and with a pop of magic Luna’s big eyes blink and she lets out a pleased laugh while Flitwick claps his hands. “Very well done, Mr. Malfoy!”

“What did he do?” Granger asks.

Luna twists herself in an improbable position so her feet are high in the air, “He vanished my shoes!”

“ _Malfoy_ ,” Potter hisses, a glare replacing his look of confusion, which at least makes him look more like a proper pureblood and less like a dunderhead. “Can you try and not to be a jerk for five minutes?”

He’s not about to justify or explain his relationship with his cousin to anybody, least of all Saint Potter. “Well I could  _try_ ,” he drawls in the most obnoxious way possible. He addresses Minerva before anyone else has a chance to start yelling at him. “I submitted my lesson plans last week, have you had a chance to go over them?”

“They’re perfectly acceptable,” she says. “Although, weren’t you planning to make the sixth years make the Poor Man’s Faerie Dust next month?”

“I was,” he says, “but I couldn’t be sure some of them wouldn’t poison themselves on purpose out of spite. They’ll get the boring potions until I’m sure they’re not willing to maim themselves.”

She gets a pinched look on her face, and he knows she wants to say that he’s being ridiculous, but he’s really not. He’s certain there’s a Gryffindor student stupid enough to risk their own life if they think it’ll get him sacked, and he’s not eager to give them the opportunity. Before the silence can become awkward, Pomona pipes in with, “Well, I think growing and harvesting the ingredient yourself is a lovely idea! It’ll give the students a real sense of responsibility. We should partner up and see if the herbology classes can grow some of those for you.” She turns to Longbottom, “Neville dear, do sit down with Draco and figure out a schedule for what he needs, and when he needs it.”

Longbottom looks like he’s being sent to the gallows. Draco is more amused than anything else, which is a new development.

~

Draco is seated in front his vanity with his lesson plans spread out all around him and Theodore Nott glaring at him from his mirror. “I really don’t see what the problem is,” Draco says. His mother would be appalled if she could see the state of his hair, but Theo’s seen him scrambling to get ready for class in his underwear, so that air of mystery has been gone between them for about a decade.

“The problem,” Daphne says, pushing Theo out of the way so she takes up the majority of the mirror, “is that you  _didn’t tell us_.” Honestly, the oddest relationship to come out of the war had been those two. Theo was the son of a sadistic Death Eater and Daphne was a  _Greengrass_. So strange.

“I don’t see why I would,” he answers. “Do you care if I spend my days teaching snot nosed children how to make pepper up potion?”

“My family still has a Wizenmagot seat,” she reminds him, glaring. “If you’re preparing to take office, you should have told me! We can start softening up the other members for you.”

Daphne had always been able to see through all his bullshit. It’s one of the reasons he’d purposely not hung out with her much during school. “Why go through the effort? Neither the Greengrass nor the Nott families have an alliance with the Malfoys.”

“It’s not the twelfth century anymore, Draco,” she says, rolling her eyes. “Not everything is down to alliances and life debts.”

“Well, what is it down to then?” he demands, absently switching a couple lessons around to give the herbology students some room for error.

“Blood,” she says. Draco looks up sharply, because those are dangerous words without any context. “You do support the Blood Laws, don’t you?”

“Obviously,” he says.

She shrugs, “Good. Great Aunt Eliza does too.” Lady Eliza Greengrass is beautiful and scary – her and Rosamund had gone to Hogwarts at the same time, about thirty or so years before Albus Dumbledore. “Draco, give it fifty years and no one will care about this silly war. But you  _are_  Lord Malfoy, and with that titles comes a reputation and power that my family simply doesn’t have.”

“The Greengrass family has been a part of the House of Lords and Ladies far longer than the Malfoys,” he says, but she simply raises an eyebrow at him and he almost grins. “All right, I understand, I’m just saying.”

Theo squeezes back into the mirror to say, “Look, it’s not like anyone cares where you come from or when your family came over from France. You’re the son of Malfoy and Black, and when you speak people will listen. We did.”

“We were children, and I was an obnoxious pain in the ass,” he throws back. “Flattery doesn’t work when your target knows you’re lying.”

“You were an asshole,” Daphne agrees, and Draco rolls his eyes. “But you were  _fun_ _,_ too. You were clever and ridiculous and charming and  _powerful_. You still are. That’s more than enough reason for people to follow you.”

Draco stares at her for a long moment. Daphne has always been able to see through all his bullshit. He hadn’t expected her opinion to be anything close to positive. “Okay,” he says, and he has to clear his throat before he can continue, “flattery does work sometimes.”

Daphne’s grin is wicked. Underneath all the lace and manners, she is one of them, after all. “Now, we obviously can’t push for the Blood Laws immediately –”

Pip appears next to him with a quiet crack. “Master Draco,” she whispers, “Professor Potter is here for you.”

He sighs deeply. Maybe if he ignores him, he’ll go away? No, that’s never worked for anyone in twenty four years.

“Getting abandoned for Potter,” Theo says. “Now I really do feel like we’re back in school.”

“Sod off,” he grumbles. “We’ll talk later.”

“Looking forward to it!” Daphne says cheerfully before dragging Theo out of the mirror’s frame. Draco cancels the two-way charm and summons a sheet over the mirror for good measure before going to answer his door, charming his hair smooth as he goes.

He’s not sure what he’s expecting, exactly. Accusations of being an evil, a curse to the face, or maybe even for Potter to throw a punch. What he’s definitely _not_  expecting is Potter awkwardly shuffling outside his door and fiddling with his shirt cuffs. “Hey, Malfoy,” he says, smiling automatically before remembering they don’t smile at each other and quickly forcing his face into an exaggerated frown. “I mean Draco – I mean – Professor?”

Honestly.

“Don’t hurt yourself, Potter,” he drawls, leaning against the door frame. “Call me whatever you like. You’ve never needed permission before.”

“Right,” he says, running his hand through his hair. Has he never heard of a grooming charm? Granger at least always manages to look respectable, and she has enough hair to make sweaters for several small impoverished countries. “I have a question.”

Draco waits. Potter continues standing there looking like he’d rather be anywhere else. "Yes?"

Harry rubs the back of his neck and won’t meet his eyes. “I wasn’t trying to see – it’s just, when you were cleaning floor, you had your – your sleeves were rolled up.”

Draco stares. Is Potter trying to tell him he’s aroused by his forearms?

“I saw your arm. There’s – are you using a charm to hide it?” Draco keeps staring. Harry gives an embarrassed shrug, “I didn’t think you could cover it is all.”

“Potter,” he says finally, “would you like to try that again, in English? Or French, or German, or Latin. My Japanese is pretty rusty, but we can get Luna in here if it means you’ll start making sense.”

“Your Dark Mark,” Potter snaps, flushing, and merlin, why couldn’t he have said that in the first place?

Draco sighs and neatly rolls the sleeve of his left arm up to his elbow, “Satisfied?”

Potter’s mouth parts in surprise. He absently takes Draco’s wrist in one hand and him closer so he can raise Draco’s arm up to see it better. He runs careful fingers over his unblemished skin, and Draco doesn’t consider himself to be overly pale, but there’s such a stark contrast between his colorless skin next to Potter’s.  “I  _saw it_ ,” he says quietly, more to himself than Draco.

“It was just a muggle tattoo,” he says, and Potter’s eyes finally flicker up to his. They are standing far too close for propriety. “Just a needle and ink. My mother convinced Voldemort that it would be too much of a risk during our sixth year for his magic to be on me, and then he just – forgot, I don’t know.”

“Did it hurt?” Potter asks.

He’s probably asking about getting it, but he says, “I cut it out myself with a silver dagger as soon as we got home from the Battle of Hogwarts, because I’m an  _idiot_. My parents aren’t well versed in healing spells, so I ended up brewing a healing potion myself that night. Dax was pissed.”

They are  _undoubtedly_  standing too close. “Dax?”

All it once it crashes down on Draco that this is  _Harry Potter,_  so of course he doesn’t know the name of the elf that’s served Malfoy Manor for three generations. He doesn’t know  _anything_. He’s a selfish, pathetic excuse for a pureblood, and the last thing Draco needs to do is forget that even if they’re not enemies, they’ve certainly never been friends.

“It doesn’t matter,” he says, stepping back with his head tilted up just enough that he has to look down at Potter. “Is your curiosity satisfied? May I return to my work?”

“Oh,” he blinks, hastily stepping back as well. “Yes, of course. Sorry.”

Draco slams the door shut with an imperious eye roll, then leans back against it.

Must not forget that for all his other virtues, Potter is still a blood traitor.  _Must not forget_.

~

Milly pops in front of him and says, “Misters Borgin and Burkes for you in the Great Hall, Master Draco.” It’s the day before the students are set to arrive, so they’re cutting it rather close. But he supposes that they managed to make his deadline at all is impressive enough.

“Excellent,” he says, grateful to shove aside the giant tome on spell theory Flitwick has assigned him. If he has to read another sentence about how wand movements correlate to voice volume, he's going to gouge his eyes out.

He sweeps into the great hall, but pauses at the entrance way. Borgin and Burkes are standing there in their best robes, spines straight and sneers on their lips, as they should be. But that certainly doesn’t explain why  _every other professor_  is standing there as well. “Did any of you need anything?” he says, and everyone’s eyes land on him.

“You didn’t say you were getting the desks from them,” Minerva says, and he can tell she’s two seconds away from throwing up her hands and walking out. This is her own fault. She knew exactly what he was like when she hired him.

“You got desks from an  _antique shop_?” Granger questions.

Longbottom starts, “Oh, Hermione, no –”

“My husband and I,” Burkes says, glaring down at her, “are makers of magical objects, which is the service Lord Malfoy has employed us for.”

“This is brilliant!” Pomona beams. “What a wonderful addition to the castle.”

Borgin and Burkes soften. Pomona has that effect on people, and Draco doesn't even think she does it on purpose.

Draco is about to tell them all to scram, but, well, Borgin and Burkes could use an audience. It’s been too long since they’ve had one. “Very well,” he turns on his heel and walks away. “We best get started.”

He doesn’t look behind him, but he knows they’re all following him. He opens the door to potions classroom with a swish of his wand.

He’s spent the better part of the past week getting it ready, and the looks of surprise and admiration on everyone’s faces make it all worth it. The stones have been scrubbed until they gleam, and the floor is covered with a thin layer of magic to protect the castle’s stonework from absorbing any more spilled potions. It had taken Draco and Filius that better part of three days to work out the correct incantations, and every couple minutes the floor would spark and glitter with their magic. He’s banished all the candles and sconces, which had always been completely inefficient at providing enough light to work by anyway.

Instead, scattered across the ceiling are glass orbs containing suspended lumos charms, so a steady soft light fills the room. He’d sacrificed the entire left wall for a glass storage case to contain the dry ingredients, while the wet ones are kept in cabinets of darkly polished wood. The right wall is a series of intricate shelves that contain everything from the gold cauldrons needed for advanced potions, to motar and pestles, to the different stirring spoons and vials needed for varying potions. Draco has shoved all the unused books in the old storage closet and installed a safe in the very back for the truly dangerous ingredients, something he wouldn’t have thought to do if he hadn’t remembered the ridiculous polyjuice situation that Granger had gotten involved in during their second year.

He’s turned the dark and dank room into something bright and beautiful and glittering. Even Pansy had been impressed when he’d taken her mirror around. “Everyone up against the wall,” he commands. “Give them some room.” He temporarily cancels his and Filius’s charm on the floor to prevent it from interfering. They can recast it once this is over.

Everyone shuffles against the wall at the front of the classroom, doubling up when they run out of room. Borgin goes to one end of the room, and Burkes to the other. Burkes removes a stack of papers from inside his robe, and with a dramatic twirl of his wand all sixteen of them are arranged in neat rows on the ground. He raises his wand, “On my count. One, two –”

“Three,” Borgin finishes, and as one they move their wands in a complicated design, golden fire trailing from their wands. Each one of them is sketching one half of a celtic knot. Once it’s complete, they fling their wands forward and back like fishing poles so the designs collide into each other, and the force of their combined magic is so powerful that the castle shakes. The papers burn and expand, twisting until they become perfectly polished rectangles of obsidian. The sparks lengthen and grow until delicate threads of shining iron curl under the blocks of obsidian and raise them from the ground and grow into dainty legs. Once they stop expanding, the last sparks dance along the legs and sides of the desk top, inscribing runes into the surface.

Draco walks down the center aisle, running critical eyes over the desks. They are more beautiful than he imagined. He looks to the craftsmen and says, “Excellent work. As I expected.”

They give him shallow bows, “Thank you, Lord Malfoy. It’s always an honor to service the Malfoy family.”

“As it is our honor to be so serviced by those of unparalleled skill,” he returns. He casts a wordless summoning charm, and the matching stools he’d commissioned appear alongside the desks. Perfect.

“Wonderful,” Pomona says, “absolutely wonderful! Come with me, boys, I’ll show you two out.”

They leave with Sprout, the older woman still heaping compliments on them as they walk out the door. “That was  _amazing_ ,” Longbottom says, and Draco decides to stop being surprised by Longbottom. At this rate, it can only become exhausting. “My gran has a china cabinet that’s magic made, and a few other smaller things. But sixteen desks! Incredible.”

“They’ll probably outlive all of us,” Draco agrees. “At least we won’t have any more life threatening potions accidents.”

“What do you mean?” Granger butts in, her fingers twitching like she wants nothing more than to run her hands over the desks. “What are those runes?”

“Protection,” Minerva says, and once again she’s looking at Draco like he’s not what she expected. “The obsidian and iron absorb excess magic to prevent it from affecting the potion, as well as acting like a low level cleansing charm so objects or ingredients that have been tampered with won’t be affected. The runes are for neutrality and protection. Should a potion explode, the magic of the explosion will be contained by the desks themselves.”

“But not the potion itself,” Draco points out. “Pomfrey will still be healing burns every week.”

“That’s really impressive,” Potter says earnestly. Granger elbows him in the side, and he winces but doesn’t look at her.

Filius pats Draco on the arm, which is the highest part of him he can reach. “Truly a work of art, Draco. The students will be thrilled.”

The students. Who are arriving tomorrow.

Right, brilliant. Draco can do this. He can handle a few hundred children.

It’s going to be fine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hope you liked it!
> 
> now that the kids will be here and class is in session things will start moving much more quickly :)
> 
> feel free to follow / harass me at: shanastoryteller.tumblr.com 
> 
> (i also post writing progress reports under the 'progress report' tag so you can know what i'm up to!)


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please take the slow build tag very seriously

Draco wears his silk Slytherin green robes to the sorting. He knows the kind of attention it’ll draw, but he’s not ashamed of who he is, and he won’t allow his students to be either.

“This is my favorite part,” Filius says, straining to get a better look at the line of first years nervously walking into the great hall. “I love beginnings!”

He rolls his eyes. Flitwick may be brilliant, and one of his coworkers that he genuinely likes, but he’s also more than a bit odd. Draco scans the row of first years, and he has no problem picking out his cousin Markel who’s walking next to Marilyn, their heads held high. They’ll go to his house, no doubt. Luca Greengrass and the Ollivander girl follow behind, and Luca will likely be Slytherin as well. Every Ollivander since Hogwarts’s founding has gone to Ravenclaw, but that’s fine. Their family is loyal to the magic, and it always had been. No matter what side of the war they fall on, they never forget their duty.

The Flint twins will be sorted into Slytherin, of course. They’re impeccably mannered vindictive little brats, if Draco’s memory serves him correctly. There’s a Patil down there, and they’re always a wild card. There are two Brown cousins, and they’ll go to Gryffindor of course. He goes through the rest of the children, mentally ticked off family ties and house allegiances as he goes.

There are six children he doesn’t know. Halfbloods then, or muggleborns. There’s a boy that reminds him strongly of Pansy, but he knows all the Parkinson children and he  _would_  have heard if one had gone rogue and shacked up with a muggle, so he dismisses that out of hand. However, the Parkinsons and Carrows do share a common ancestor, and he wouldn’t be surprised at all if one of latter lost their marbles and got attached to a muggle.

“Pay attention,” Luna says, elbowing Draco as Pomona begins reading off the names.

There aren’t any surprises. The Patil goes to Hufflepuff, and Slytherin gets the Goyles, the Flints, Luca, plus three more children from respectable families and one of the kids he doesn’t recognize. Nine is a small class, but not reprehensible, he can work with nine – they’re only halfway through the sorting, but he’s not expecting any more. All the others are either allied directly against them, or too loyal to their family’s house to stray.

“Andrea Ollivander,” Pomona calls out, and Draco doesn’t even look up. She’ll provide a strong alliance for his snakes in Ravenclaw. She and Marilyn have been friends since they were toddlers, and it’s unlikely that either girl will throw that friendship away now.

“SLYTHERIN!”

Draco whips his head up. He’s not the only one to do so. The hall goes so silent you could hear a pin drop.

Andrea calmly takes off the hat and hands it to a wide eyed Pomona. She looks straight at Draco and inclines her head while going into a deep curtsey. Draco nods in return, mouth dry, and he  _cannot_  believe this is happening. This has never happened before. Ollivanders go to Ravenclaw, they always have. Marilyn shoves Markel down the bench to make room for Andrea, and at that the whole house comes alive, clapping to welcome to their new housemate. It sounds especially loud since everyone else has barely remembered to breathe.

“Merlin’s balls,” Luna says. “Even I didn’t see that coming. And I’m the divinations professor.”

“Oh, knock it off,” Granger snaps, and Draco glances at her and Potter. Neither of them understand what just happened, but it looks like at least they understand that they don’t understand. He’s not going to be the one to explain it to them. Let Longbottom take care of that.

Luna raises an eyebrow, “There are mystical forces beyond our control, Hermione. It does not do to be a disbeliever of the universe.”

Ever since she was a little kid, Luna has been able to say the stupidest shit with a completely straight face. She’s not clinically insane like Xeno, so Draco doesn’t know how much of the crap coming out of her mouth she actually believes. But, he knows his cousin well enough that’s it’s obvious to him that she’s messing with Granger right now.  _Granger_  doesn’t know that though, which makes it extra hilarious.

The rest of the sorting doesn’t go as expected. He gets two more of the unknown students, and one of the  _Abbott_ cousins, which is a surprise. They’re more flexible with their house allegiances, but they almost always end up in either Hufflepuff or Gryffindor, bringing up the total of his first year class to thirteen. That’s almost as many as they used to have before the first war.

Draco looks down the table at Minerva, and she seems incredibly pleased with herself. All the Slytherins keep glancing up at him like he’ll disappear if at least one of them isn’t looking directly at him.

Luna nudges him in the ribs and he almost smiles at her. It is, tentatively speaking, a massive success.

~

He strides into the Slytherin common room after the feast, and the seventy three students he’s now directly responsible for are assembled in neat rows. His thirteen new first years are in front and a group of decidedly unimpressed seventh years in the back, including one girl who’s outright glowering at him. He can’t decide if he’s impressed or offended.

“Hello,” he says, folding his hands behind his back. None of them respond, but he hadn’t expected them to. “Everyone from a noble house step to the other side of the room.”

There’s a moment of confused stillness, but then half of his students shuffle over to one side of the room. “Everyone who’s a pureblood step to the left wall.” Most of the rest walk over, leaving fourteen nervous children, including the three first years he hadn’t recognized. “Halfbloods to my left, muggleborns to my right.”

Six muggleborns, and eight halfbloods, but only four years shared between the muggleborns. He turns to address the halfblood group. “You will be judged for the actions of your parents. It’s unfortunate, and can’t be helped. But you are here now, and you  _are_ of magic. You were born to be right here, in this world and with these people.” He rubs the back of his neck, and it’s a sign of weakness, but it’s one that makes the kids instantly relax, which had been the whole point. “You know the line you walk better than most. Which is why it’s your job to help your muggleborn classmates. They’re being thrown into this world blind, and it is you alone who can explain it to them. You know both the world they come from, and the world they’re now a part of.”

Next, he looks to the noble children. He knows all of them of course, knows their parents and their lords and ladies. “We must not allow our muggleborn and halfblood brethren to fall behind and disgrace our house. They must be educated, because Slytherins are educated, and they’re one of us now. I require four volunteers to give up two hours a day three times a week.”

“I’ll do it!” Raina Lestrange says, determination in every line of her body.

Markel and Marilyn share a considering glance before they both step forward. “We’ll help!”

“Me as well,” Liam Parkinson says, subdued. He’s probably only doing it because he knows if he doesn’t, his Aunt Pansy will kill him. Draco understands the feeling intimately.

Draco inclines his head in thanks, then makes a sweeping gesture. “All of you back in one group.” They listen, mixing together once again, but more than a few of them are giving him strange looks. That’s fine. “Blood is important,” he says seriously, and the halfbloods and muggleborns flinch. “It is the very foundation of our society, the support structure to which our culture relies on.” He looks at all of their angry and scared faces. “You are all here by right of blood. Magic runs through your veins and makes it home in your heart. Some of you answer to Lords and Ladies who guard your family’s magic, some of you are from families who’ve always fulfilled your duties, and some of you have no ancient blood in your veins, are new and alone, adrift at sea.” He makes certain to look every muggleborn in the eye, because the halfbloods may know this, but he doubts the muggleborns do. “You are magic’s gift to this world. You were born of it and you will die by it, and there will always be a place for you here. But magic doesn’t come free, it doesn’t come cheap. It will take, and you must be willing to give.”

The purebloods are looking at him, something solemn and ancient in these children’s faces, because they have never forgotten their place in this world. Their families know their debt. Marilyn, the heir to the Goyle family, looks like she’s a moment away from crying, and Markel takes her hand.

Magic isn’t pretty. It’s isn’t nice. It isn’t easy. Anyone who thinks otherwise hasn’t been paying attention. The muggleborns and halfbloods don’t understand, not really, but that’s okay.

They will learn. Draco has no more patience for blood traitors, for betrayers, for those who take and do not give. Slytherins have always guarded the ancient ways, and no matter what those muggle loving fools like to think, they are needed now more than ever.

~

“How’d it go?” Pansy demands, crowding into his mirror. Draco twitches because his back is to the mirror and he’s mostly naked. He’s certain he’d left a sheet over his mirror for this very reason. “Did Liam behave?”

Well, it’s not like Pansy hasn’t seen him naked before. “It went fine,” he sighs, turning around. He freezes and glares, because Pansy isn’t alone in his mirror. “Hello, Lord Parkinson.”

“Lord Malfoy,” William says. He’s Pansy’s cousin (great uncle once removed, technically), and the old man is definitely laughing at him. He tries to decide what would be less dignified, scrambling into some clothes or continuing this conversation in his underwear. “I trust the children are well?”

Whatever. He’s pretty sure Lord Parkinson changed his diapers at some point anyway. “As well as can be expected, I suppose. We have thirteen first years.”

Pansy beams and a slow look of surprise and pleasure comes over William’s face. Draco’s glad to see it. He’s only a decade or so older than Lucius, but the cheerful man had begun to look worn since the war had ended. Things had gotten so much harder for them all after the war ended. “That  _is_  very good news.”

“We got an Ollivander,” he says. Pansy shoves her cousin up against the mirror in her excitement, and he can’t help but laugh at her.

“You’re lying!” she accuses, but her face is as bright and happy as he’s seen it since they were children. Pansy is remarkably pretty when she smiles. “They always go to Ravenclaw!”

William carefully pushes himself away from the glass and throws Pansy a fondly exasperated look. “Who is it?”

“Andrea, the wandmaker’s niece if I’m not mistaken. She’s the, uh,” he frowns and looks to Pansy. She knows the Ravenclaw families better than he does.

“Third cousin twice removed from Lady Ollivander, and a second cousin once removed to Lord Brown,” she answers promptly.

Both Draco and William stare at her. “The Ollivanders and Browns intermarried?”

“Third cousins, the youngest of their families at the time,” Pansy says dismissively. “Nothing to cause a scandal, unfortunately.” Pansy did love a good scandal. It’s probably why she's even better than Draco at tracking family lines. “Anyway, she’s not a prominent member of the Ollivander family, unless they plan to marry her to the son of the heir. Which rumor says they are, but nothing has been announced yet.”

“Oberon?” Draco says, raising an eyebrow. Future heir or not, Oberon is a funny looking kid. Nice, though, and he knows the Ollivanders are into that sort of thing.

Pansy must know what he’s thinking, because she smirks and says, “Now now, the Ollivanders are a wonderful, if strange looking, family.”

“Just the men,” William says dryly. “The women have always been quite lovely.” He gives Draco an appreciative once over, “We can’t all be Malfoys, after all.”

Draco does a little twirl, and Pansy dissolves into peals of laughter. “Being this pretty is a burden, but I suppose someone must bear it.”

William rolls his eyes, “Good night, Lord Malfoy.” He taps his wand to the glass and it shimmers like throwing a stone in a lake before it’s simply his mirror once more.

“Good night, Lord Parkinson,” he says, although the man is no longer able to hear him.

For the first time in a long time, things are looking up.

~

Draco can’t help but be smug when he swans in the next day and sees how exhausted the other heads of house look. The students from the other houses in varied states of harried sleep deprivation. His snakes, on the other hand, look perfectly presentable.

“Why are you so chipper?” Potter mutters, resting his chin on his hand in a horrible attempt to hide the fact that he’s moments away from falling asleep at the high table. “You must have been up half the night with your students like the rest of us. Or do Slytherins consider it beneath them to celebrate returning to school?”

His good mood is instantly halved. He takes his traditional seat between Luna and Filius. “Most things are beneath us, or so I’m told.”

Potter’s too tired to do more than glare at him, but it’s not like he’s the sharpest tool in the box to begin with. A strong hand grabs Draco’s wrist, and his eyebrows raise nearly to his hairline as twists and watches Longbottom press Draco’s hand to his face. “Neville!” Granger says, appalled.

Longbottom ignores her and looks down at Draco accusingly, still holding his hand hostage. “Cinnamon and mandrake! You rotten cheat!”

He smirks. “Oh, is intelligence cheating now? I suppose that’s why you’ve always been so honest.”

Potter snarls, but Longbottom only holds out his other hand. “Malfoy, Lord or not, if you don’t share I will drag you onto the grounds and  _strangle you_. Custom be damned.”

This is the best conversation he and Longbottom have ever had. He should make sure he’s sleep deprived more often, “Did the ickle Hufflepuffs keep you awake all night?” As Pomona’s apprentice, Longbottom has rooms right next to hers, and therefore right next to the Hufflepuff common room.

“They were bloody screaming until four in the morning,” he confirms, glaring. “Hand it over!”

“Neville, what are you talking about?” Granger demands.

Luna leans her elbows on the table and shakes her hair over her shoulders to hide her grin. “Well, Draco is the Potions Master, isn’t he?”

“The bastard made pepper up potion for his house,” Longbottom explains.

Draco scoffs. “Don’t be ridiculous. I had the fifth years do it. They were more than happy for a jump on their extra credit.”

“ _Draco_ ,” Longbottom says warningly.

He rolls his eyes, “All right, all right, there’s no need to be so dramatic.” Filius snorts and Minerva develops a sudden cough, which Draco ignores. He reaches into his robs with the hand Longbottom isn’t holding onto, and with a twirl and pull of his wand, a vial drops out of the air and into Longbottom’s waiting hand.

He uncaps the it and downs it all in one long gulp. He instantly looks refreshed. “That was three doses,” Draco feels the need to point out.

Longbottom finally lets go of his hand and returns the vial, which Draco vanishes back to his classroom. “Excellent. Now I just might be able to make it to lunch.”

“Sure, Longbottom,” he says, finally reaching for his teacup. “Just don’t come crying to me when you cough smoke for the next week.”

Longbottom frowns, and the man is well on his way to attaining a herbology mastery. He should be well aware of the effect of consuming too much powdered bicorn horn. “Call me Neville,” he says, jutting up his chin like he’s daring Draco to refuse. “We’ll save the last names for when we’re serving in the House together.”

He stares, and it’s not like it’s a bad idea. Draco’s on a first name basis with the man’s grandmother after all, and, despite appearances, Augusta can’t actually live forever, so one day her grandson will take her place and become Lord Longbottom. But Augusta knows better than to let a war get in the way of tradition. Then again, there’s war and there’s years of petty bullying, and oddly Draco figures one is harder to get over than the other. Look at Snape.

Actually, comparing him to Snape is a disservice to both of them so Draco puts the whole idea out his head and says, “Don’t be ridiculous, Neville. Augusta is going to outlive both of us.”

~

Draco arrives late to his first class of the day because he can, and to be honest he just wants to see what they’ll do when they’re left alone for fifteen minutes. It’s Gryffindor and Slytherin third years, so he’s half expecting his classroom to be destroyed when he walks inside.

Instead it’s dead silent. The houses appear to be having a staring contest, which is ridiculous, but at least not destructive. He can’t tell if he’s disappointed or not. “Gather your belongings and stand up,” he orders. The Slytherins obey instantly. The Gyffindors take three times as long, but Draco doesn’t give them the satisfaction of repeating himself. “One Gryffindor and one Slytherin to a desk. You have thirty seconds to pick your seats before I pick them for you.”

There’s a moment of stunned silence from both sides.

He raises an eyebrow. “Now you have twenty seconds.”

Raina runs to the middle desk in the front row, uncaring of who sits beside her. The rest of his Slytherins exchange quick glances, then they all take the left spot on the desks. The weakest of them sit in the front, and strongest to the back to keep an eye on the rest. There’s a reason Draco sat at the back of every class, and while he wishes this wasn’t something his students felt the need to do, he’s glad to see that they’re still looking out for each other. The Gryffindors, as expected, spend fifteen seconds looking indignant and then randomly throw themselves into whatever seat’s available at the last moment.

“Congratulations,” he says, “The person sitting beside you is your lab partner for the rest of the year.”

Raina looks horrified. She turns to glare at the cringing redheaded boy next to her, who is  _obviously_  a Weasley, and it would be completely unprofessional for Draco to laugh at her, but he’s sorely tempted.

“Now,” he claps his hands together, “I’d introduce myself, but you all know who I am. To start,  put your cauldrons away, and take out a notebook. Potions isn’t charms, or transfiguration. It’s dangerous and one wrong move could end in you blowing up my classroom. I will be very cross if you blow up my classroom.”

Gryffindors and Slytherins alike are glaring at him, so that’s a start. All except Raina, who sits with her quill poised and ready.

He’s sending Rosamund a fruit basket. Thank merlin for the Lestranges.

~

He has a stack student schedules in front of him, trying to figure out a period of time that works for all of them. He considers adding in the halfbloods, but it’s not worth the effort. They grew up with it, at least in part, so he’ll let them know they’re allowed to sit in on the lessons, but won’t require it. Once a week he’ll lead the lesson, and the other two sessions he’ll leave up to the purebloods to tell the muggleborns what they think they ought to know. Considering all the purebloods who volunteered are also from noble families, it’ll be a good test of their leadership skills.

He considers opening it the other houses, but decides against it. The Gryffindors will be sure sabotage it, and it’s not like he can allow everyone but them to join. He may recommend to Pomona and Filius that they consider starting one. It’s foolish to think children will pick up on traditions and duty on their own when there a plenty of adults that don’t follow them.

He’s still turning it over in his head when he sits down in the great hall for lunch. He leans around Luna to ask Minerva, “Are there any empty classrooms I can take over?” He doesn’t want to hold it in his potions classroom because they shouldn’t get used to doing non-potions work there and risk them getting careless during class. Being careless around potions ends in explosions.

She sighs, and he doesn’t know what he’s done to evoke that reaction. “Any particular reason?”

He considers lying, not because he thinks Minerva will care, but because he knows Granger’s going to kill him. Well, she had to find out about it eventually. “I’m holding classes for the muggleborns.” Granger manages to hold herself back, but they’re going to have this argument anyway, so he tacks on, “They’ll never marry into good families if they stay ignorant.” Which isn’t untrue. The best thing a muggleborn can do is marry into a noble family. Back before these ridiculous wars that’s exactly what they did, and the families were more than delighted to accept new blood into the line. Fuck, it’s what Lily Evans did.

“Excuse me?” Granger spits, and at least they’re having this argument where there are a couple hundred witnesses. She probably won’t Avada Kadavra him in the middle of lunch.

Neville is a future Lord, so Draco knows he understands the necessity of educating the muggleborns, but he slinks down in his seat anyway, shooting Draco an utterly betrayed look. Honestly, if he’d thought Draco had become any less of an asshole, then that’s his problem. “I won’t have uneducated children in my house, and parents  _can’t_  teach them what they need to know. Besides,” he sniffs, “that’s what Muggle Studies used to be before Dumbledore made the  _brilliant_  decision to switch to it to being about teaching wizards about muggles, an utterly worthless pastime.”

“Knowing about muggles isn’t worthless,” she insists, glaring.

He prepares himself for an argument. Whenever he’s around Granger, he should probably be prepared for an argument. “What can I, an adult wizard, learn from muggles?”

“Electricity,” she says, “Inventions, ingenuity, science – biology! There’s so much wizards don’t know, and you stand there, so  _smug_  in your ignorance, and have the audacity to call us the uneducated ones!”

Luna and Neville won’t look at either of them, and Draco doesn’t blame them for it. Granger is their friend, but she’s also  _wrong_. Surprisingly, it’s Pomona that says, “Marina de la Cruz froze a lightning bolt out of the sky and used it to develop the first stages of the lumos charm in the year three hundred forty five before common era.”

“The first complete mapping of the human body was done by a mediwizard in the year two hundred seventeen common era,” Fillius adds, a single bushy eyebrow raised, “What is it, exactly, that you believe your own kind to be lacking in?”

“Because just to be clear,” Draco cuts in firmly, “ _you are not a muggle_. You’re a witch. In case you’ve forgotten.”

Granger’s gone from red faced to pale, and that can’t be healthy. By the look in Potter’s face, this is all news to him too.  _Despicable_. The son of James Potter doesn’t know anything about who he is, about his family or his world. This is precisely why they need the Blood Laws.

He takes a deep breath and gentles his voice, because for once he’s not actually trying to be cruel to her. “There’s a lot that you don’t know, Granger. Because no one thought to tell you. Sure, you read about the history of Hogwarts, were probably the only one to pay attention in history of magic. But goblin wars and the history of witch burnings are interesting, and important, especially if you’re planning to go into politics.” Which he’s fully aware Granger intends to do. They’ll probably end up serving on Wizengamot together. “Do you know why your boyfriend and I never got along?”

“Husband,” she corrects acidly. “Because you’re a self centered, cruel hearted bastard who cares for no one but himself?”

“Miss Granger!” Minerva says, appalled, but Draco raises a hand to silence her. Granger doesn’t know the insult she’s delivered, so he won’t hold it against her. Besides, Granger is  _vicious_  when she feels attacked. If she’d been marked as Voldemort’s nemesis, the dark lord would have been dead by the time they took their OWLS.

He leans his elbow on the table and sets his chin on his hand, “We have a three centuries long blood feud. On top of that, the Weasleys are officially recognized as blood traitors.” He directs his next words to Neville, “I’m surprised Augusta allowed you to be friends.”

Neville glares at him for dragging him into this, but Draco only raises an eyebrow. He’s going to be Lord Longbottom someday; he has to at least acknowledge his odd alliances. The House will eat him alive otherwise. “She said that we had more pressing concerns besides blood,” he says reluctantly, “and that they were still purebloods besides – it’s not like they married muggles or anything.” As soon as it comes out his mouth, he goes red, “Hermione, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Don’t apologize,” Draco commands, “She’s not a muggle, why should she be offended?”

“My parents are muggles!” she says, pushing herself to her feet with her wand gripped in her hand. The students are going to start noticing if she doesn’t calm down. “There’s nothing wrong with being a muggle!”

“Of course not,” he says, and she’s so surprised that she actually sits down again. Good. “There’s nothing wrong with dogs being dogs either, or dragons being dragons, or centaurs being centaurs. But it is  _what they are_. It’s the way they were born and the way they will die. And you, Granger, are no different. You were born a witch and you will die a witch and its high time you started acting like it.”

There’s a dead silence at the table, and everyone is looking at him. Bloody hell, he’d just wanted lunch. “Is there a classroom I can use?” he repeats, looking back to Minerva.

She hesitates, but nods. “There’s a spare room at the base of the East tower. Feel free to use that.”

“Thank you.” He looks down at his roasted duck, but everyone’s still starring at him, and honestly he’s not even hungry anymore. “Excuse me,” he says, getting to his feet. “I’ve lost track of time.”

He can feel their eyes on him as he walks away just as clearly as he can feel a headache building behind his eyes.

He needs a drink. Thank merlin it’s Friday.

~

Draco makes it through the rest of the day. As soon as his last class lets out, he floos Blaise, who is his friend for a multitude of reasons, but mostly for the way he takes one looks at Draco’s face and says, “Get back,” before stepping through the flames.

“I just wanted to talk,” he says but Blaise pulls him into a tight hug. Shit. He must look miserable. “It’s not that bad.”

“Muggles got you in a mood?” he asks, pressing a kiss to Draco’s temple. Blaise is rarely that affectionate in private, so he can’t help but smile.

“It’s not the muggles,” he says, “If only.”

Blaise pulls back and throws another handful of floo powder in the fire. “Pansy Parkinson.”

“This really isn’t necessary,” he says, but he’s ignored.

Pansy’s head appears in the fire, and she gives them both a quick once over before saying, “I expected this,” and stepping through his fire with two bottles of high quality firewhiskey in her hands.

“This really isn’t necessary,” he tries again, but Pansy bites the cork off of one of the bottles and hands it to him while walking over to bounce onto his bed. The bottle is smoking. Blaise takes off his shoes and jacket before following her.

It would be impossible for him to count the days he’s spent lying around his rooms, both at the manor and Hogwarts, in a messy pile of limbs with Blaise and Pansy, and they haven’t done it in a long time. So, he puts aside any other protests he can drudge up and shoves Pansy over so he can fit onto his own bed.

He snaps his fingers and Milly appears in front of him. She smiles at the sight of them all before she schools her face into a neutral expression. He won’t hold it against her. He’s aware they look ridiculous. “Yes, Master Draco?”

“Two bottles from my private stock,” he orders in between swigs of the firewhiskey. “Dax will know the ones, he’ll show you.”

“Yes, Master Draco,” she says before disappearing.

Pansy rolls over so she can hook her chin over his hip, “How’s your army of house elves?”

He groans and charms the firewhiskey out of the bottle so he doesn’t embarrass himself trying to drink from it while lying down. Blaise pokes at his side impatiently, so he directs the stream of smoking alcohol in his direction first. “Lovely, actually. Having seventy three spoiled, needy brats to care for is the best thing that’s ever happened to them.”

“I’m sure all the latent magic around here doesn’t hurt either,” Blaise says dryly, lifting his wand to direct the stream over to Pansy.

Draco pouts, but she only shifts enough to take two unreasonably large swallows of the firewhiskey before finally allowing Draco his turn. “Well, they certainly haven’t  _complained._ ”

“They’re good elves,” Blaise says approvingly, “Very loyal, especially now that they have a Master worth being loyal too.”

Draco drinks instead of responding to that, and Blaise sighs but doesn’t push.

Milly returns with two bottles of iceberry wine. “Nice,” Blaise says, and snags both bottles. “Very good,” he tells Milly, who beams before vanishing.

“Have you been holding out on us?” Pansy demands, twisting herself upright so she can steal one of the bottles from Blaise. “I’ve been in your wine cellar, and I would have remembered these.”

“They’re from Russia, I got them the last time I was there,” he says. “They came highly recommended.”

She uncorks the bottle, and wine needs to settle they aren’t barbarians, except Pansy apparently is, because she tips back the bottle and takes one long gulp. Draco’s appalled, but Blaise just looks impressed. “That’s delicious,” she declares, then snatches the other bottle away from Blaise, “These are mine now.”

Draco and Blaise catch each other’s eyes and grin. They discovered Pansy’s weakness at her seventh birthday party, and are fully prepared to take advantage of it to reclaim their wine.

They attack with tickling fingers, and she curses them out loudly enough that Draco’s grateful he thought to put silencing charms on his rooms.

~

It’s well past midnight and all three of them are thoroughly sloshed when Bip appears next to them and says, “You is having a visitor at your door, Master Draco.”

“Is it a student?” he slurs, because he’s enjoying being drunk and he’s not going to cast a sobering charm if he doesn’t have to. Also, he’s lost his shirt at some point during the night, and he’s going to have to try and find it if it’s a student.

Bip shakes his head.

“Excellent,” he continues, standing up and then grabbing onto the side of his bed for balance. Pansy laughs at him, but he ignores her. He’s assuming it’s Luna, because coming and irritating him in the middle of the night is one of her favorite pastimes. It’s a good thing he doesn’t need a lot of sleep.

He flings the door open, “Luna, do you ever sl-”

It’s not Luna.

“Hello, Draco,” Granger says stiffly, face flaring red. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to – to interrupt.”

He waves a hand and leans against the doorway, “Don’t worry about it. You didn’t interrupt anything.” He wonders if she can see Blaise and Pansy from the doorway, and if so how long it will take the rumors to start floating around again – well, no, again would imply that they ever really stopped. “What do you want?”

She swallows, clearly steeling herself for something, and dread pools in the bottom of Draco’s stomach. “I want to join your muggleborn classes.”

He blinks. That hadn’t been what he was expecting. “What?”

“You say I’m uneducated,” she bites out, “so educate me. I love learning, I’ll pick it up. Teach me.”

Of all the – “You love knowing, not learning, those are two different things,” he says, because he’s heard a hundred people say Granger should have been a Ravenclaw, and every time he’s thought that none of those people could have possibly met her. “Also, are you insane? I’m busy enough as it is. Have Neville teach you, he knows it all.”

He moves to close the door on her, and she shoves it back open. “Neville won’t do it! Or he will, but he’ll be too worried about hurting my feelings, and him and Ron are the same, they don’t know what I don’t know, what I’m missing. They just assume that I have all the same knowledge they do, but I don’t.”

“That was my point,” he says, and not for the first time he understands how this woman helped end the war. She’s terrifying. “No talking back to me in front of my Slytherins. If you think I’m being a bigoted prick, and I assure you that you will, you keep it to yourself until we’re alone. Understand?”

“Yes,” she says, and she looks so unbearably smug that Draco instantly regrets giving in to her. She turns on her heel and walks away without another word, head held high.

Draco sighs and closes the door. Blaise and Pansy are staring at him. “Making deals with the devil?” Blaise asks.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Draco grabs the nearest bottle, intent on draining it. “The devil’s far more reasonable than Hermione Granger.”

“Amen,” Blaise mutters, and it’s so ridiculous, the words so foreign on his tongue and in the air that they all break down laughing.

It’s going to be fine. Everything will be fine. He survived Voldemort in his home, he can survive Hermione Granger.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hope you liked it!
> 
> feel free to follow / harass me at: shanastoryteller.tumblr.com
> 
> (i also post writing progress reports under the 'progress report' tag so you can know what i'm up to!)


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *shoves all my headcannons and stray thoughts into a single fanfic and hopes for the best* sorry fam
> 
> also, since apparently this needs to be said - this is from DRACO'S POV. draco believes he's right about everything. that doesn't mean he IS. but until certain people understand what he's talking about, what many people in this society feel, they won't be able to intelligently argue against it. 
> 
> so, keep in mind: draco is not right about everything. but he's not wrong about everything either.

Draco wishes he could say he’d seen this coming.

“What the  _hell_  is this?” he demands, looking at his sixth years with just enough despair that they shuffle and look at their feet. Liam doesn’t, but then again  _he_ had at least managed an Acceptable mark. “I know over half your families, and I know they’ve been training you in the dark arts, which certainly means they’ve trained you in the defense of them as well.” He’s a step away from channeling his mother and tapping his foot.

“None of do well in Defense, Professor,” Nikole says eventually, and he’d always been bull headed and stubborn enough that if his family line wasn’t so loyal to Slytherin, he would certainly have been a Gryffindor. “Well, the mudbloods do all right, but the rest of us – not so much.”

“Language,” he says absently, because he’s an absolute  _moron_ , of course his snakes are failing Defense. He supposes he should count himself lucky that they’re not doing the same with Arithmancy. He crosses his arms and huffs, “This is unacceptable.”

“Yes,” they all say at once, because they know. He assumes this is a problem his whole house is having. This is really a conversation he should be having with all of them.

He considers talking to Potter about it for half a second, but dismisses the idea just as quickly. Self-centered, dunderhead Scar Head will only make matters worse. “Okay,” he says, more to himself than them. He  _can’t_  do this on his own. If he tries, it will inevitable cause some other part of his life to fall to pieces. “I’ll figure something out,” he says. “Spread this to the other years, all right? Make sure one of you is attends class and takes diligent notes, but beyond that I don’t care if you bother to show up. Make sure I receive a copy of all these notes. Understand?”

“Yes sir,” Liam says. They’re all looking at him again, the same way the old families have started looking at him, and it makes the back of his neck itch.

He gives them a sharp nod and leaves, head spinning.

Given the choice, he’d get Millicent Bulstrode to do it. She’d always been right behind him in terms of marks, and was terrifying enough that none of his snakes would dare step out of line. But he doesn’t even want to think about how much of a headache it would be to get permission to be on the grounds without either Granger or Potter catching scent of it.

Instead, he stomps his way down to the greenhouse, scowling. He bangs open the door and says, “I need a favor.”

Neville looks up at him and wilts. “I’m not going to like this, am I?”

“Well,” Draco considers, “It will give you more chances to ogle my cousin. Something I’ve been politely ignoring, by the way.”

Neville turns bright red and flings the Strangling Vine in his hands at Draco, who quickly ducks out of the way and out of the greenhouse.

He’ll take that as a tentative yes.

~

Maybe it’s a mistake to ask Neville to teach his Slytherins, but he doesn’t think it is. Neville, like Potter, fought in the war and against many of the old families. Neville, unlike Potter, is a respected Heir who doesn’t give off the same razor sharp energy, the same – Potter probably likes to think he’s a pacifist, and he is, in a way. But the years he spent as an Auror are legendary. He did everything with a single-minded intensity that was both impressive and terrifying, from all accounts.

Of course his snakes can’t concentrate in Defense, of course they check out and don’t pay attention and skip class. How many of them have family that died in the war, how many of them heard the rumors of how the Slytherins were treated and demonized, how many of them experience the brunt of that very same prejudice even now?

Draco knew Potter back when he was nothing more than a goody-two-shoes brat, he knows what he looks like spitting up pumpkin juice and after losing a match, remembers him with ink stains on his face from falling asleep on his assignments. He knows that Potter is, at his core, an annoyingly powerful wizard who means well, but is, ultimately, a  _moron_.

But the kids don’t know that. All they know is how they and their families have been treated, all they know is the stories they were told. So of course they don’t want to sit in a classroom and be taught defense by Potter. Each of them believes the man would be equally willing to turn his wand on them as he was Voldemort.

Never mind that Potter was never all the eager to face Voldemort, all the way to the bitter end.

They are  _children, and children hardly thrive on logic._ They belive that one of their professors not only cares nothing for them, but perhaps even wants them dead. It certainly explains Raina’s reaction when he’d first met her at the party. Draco knows that it’s not true, that at his very worst Potter is just an idiot. He’s not malicious, especially to kids.

But these children are under his protection now, so he needs to fix it. Sine he can’t go and have an honest conversation with him about this, he almost wishes Potter would take his title like a proper pureblood so he could challenge him to a duel and be done with it. In lieu of that, there’s showing them that not all Gryffindors, not all war heroes, are Harry Potter.

If he could, he’d show them that Harry Potter himself isn’t even that terrible, that spiteful.

But maybe he’s wrong. It’s been a long time since they shared a classroom, and people change.

Draco certainly did.

~

The night of the first muggleborn class, he and Granger arrive at the classroom at the same time. He holds the door open for her, and she glares at him like it’s a trick.

It’s not. He’s just holding open a  _door_ , for merlin’s sake.

“After you,” he says pleasantly, “I insist.”

She rolls her eyes but steps inside. He just barely restrains himself from sighing.

“Children,” he greets. Liam snorts. His four purebloods and six muggleborns are already there. Excellent. “Professor Granger will be joining us for the foreseeable future. Please speak freely. While she is in these lessons with us, she will neither issue detention nor take away points. Isn’t that right, Professor?”

“Yes, Professor Malfoy,” she says, nose upturned just the slightest bit at him. It’s a pity she hates them all so much. She’d have fit in quite well with her attitude. “That is correct.”

“Excellent,” he says, and looks to the purebloods. “Now, which of you will be leading today’s lesson?” Markel and Marilyn blanche and Raina looks worried, but Liam slides down in his seat because he knows what’s coming. “Liam, thank you so much for volunteering.” That’s what the brat gets for showing him attitude. The kid was born when Draco was a first year, and he remembers Liam’s mother shoving the baby into his hands at one of Narcissa’s garden parties and then  _laughing_  at his panicked fumbling. Payback is sweet.

Liam drags himself to his feet, managing to give the impression of slouching even while his back remains perfectly straight. There’s a vague possibility that the kid picked that up from him, actually. “Where should I start, Professor?”

“Wherever you think is most relevant,” Draco says. Just because he’s an adult doesn’t mean he’s not an asshole.

Liam narrows his eyes like he agrees, then lets out a long sigh. The muggleborns look apprehensive, all except fifth year Georgiana. She looks like she wants to spit on him, which he approves of in theory. If she actually did it, then that would be a different matter. “Very well then,” he says. “I don’t suppose anyone has any questions I can address?” Granger’s hand shoots into the air. Liam blinks, clearly having not expected that, and Draco doesn’t laugh at him. “Uh, yes, Professor?”

“What’s with this whole lord thing?” she demands. “I tried looking it up, but all I could find was that they were the heads of powerful families.”

“Well, that’s it really,” Liam says. “If you’re the head of a family that’s part of the House, then you’re a Lord. Or Lady.”

“House?” she asks. “Like Hogwarts house?”

Liam stares. “No. The House of Lords and Ladies. It’s uh,” he frowns, “it’s like the Wizengamot if the Wizengamot fails, you know?”

Draco is so glad he never has to grade any of Liam’s essays.

“That’s a terrible way to put it!” Raina glares. “ _Before_  we had the Ministry, we had Lords and Ladies who cared for us. We pledged our allegiance to them, our land and our blood, and in return they gave us their protection.”

“So it’s an old government system?” Niles asks, a second year muggleborn who had the highest marks in Divination in his year. Draco doesn’t know if that’s because he actually has a talent for it, or if it’s just because Luna like him.

Liam winces and Raina looks appalled. Draco decides to put them out their misery. “All right, sit down,” he says, rising to his feet and taking Liam’s place. He pulls his wand from his robes, “That was an excellent question, Professor Granger, and a solid place to start.” She glares. He isn’t being sarcastic. “The muggle world is a world based on a system of laws that are decided upon by muggles and then enforced by other muggles. As such, this system of laws and the manner in which they are decided varies by culture, time period, and place.”

He drags his wand across the air and five small golden people appear. “The magical world has  _never_ functioned this way. We have different languages, different cultures, different spells, different values. But across the world our underlying political system has been the same.” He flicks his wand, and the five golden figure bow, “We all have a House of Lords and Ladies, although it goes by different names. Heads of noble families used to perform the same role Wizengamot currently does. We would convene to discuss issues, vote on laws and regulations, and put on trial those who break our laws. That changed a couple hundred years ago.” He doesn’t bother to keep the contempt out of his voice, “We were replaced by the Wizengamot. For a long time, all Lords and Ladies were guaranteed political seats, as is our  _due_. Albus Dumbledore spearheaded and passed a law so that we would have to be voted into our positions, which was of course the beginning of our downfall.”

“What do you mean?” Granger asks. “Isn’t that a good thing? Why should people be given political positions just because they were born?”

“Most of the muggle world relied on a familial monarchy system for a few thousand years, if I’m not mistaken,” he says dryly. “But Lords and Ladies must do more than simply be  _born_.”

She scoffs, “Like what? Bow all nice and pretty and not upset your parents, and you too will get to be rich and successful?”

“You’re wrong,” Marilyn says, and Draco raises an eyebrow. The eleven year old is glaring at Granger, and Marilyn may be fairly outspoken within the family, but not in front of strangers. “My father is Lord Goyle, and I am the Heir to our family, but I might not become Lady Goyle. That’s not something me or my parents get to decide.”

“Who decides then?” Granger asks, softening her voice now that she’s speaking to a student.

Draco holds out his wand, “Did you choose your wand, Granger? Did you pick one up and declare that this was the one for you and take it home?”

“Of course not,” she snaps. “The wand chooses the wizard. Or witch.”

“Yes,” Markel says. He’s speaking to her like she’s stupid, which isn’t appropriate behavior, but it’s funny so Draco’s not going to call him on it. "Exactly. The magic chooses you. Just like the magic chooses our Lords and Ladies.”

“ _What_? That doesn’t make any sense!”

The purebloods look at her, then slowly slide their gazes to him, disbelief on their faces. “Be nice,” he admonishes, “they didn’t grow up like we did.” He turns to Granger, “My father is still alive, yet I am Lord Malfoy. Because the magic rejected him.” His father, who attended every meeting, who guarded their traditions, who taught Draco to ride a broom and read him bedtime stories , and who the magic declared unworthy. It’s not like he doesn’t understand why, but that doesn’t make it hurt any less. “It chose me,” he says, and he knows this is hard for outsiders to understand, but it’s so  _simple_  to the rest of them. “The magic chose me, and here I am. Just as it chose James Potter, just as it chose Augusta Longbottom, just as I’m sure it will choose Neville to take her place. It’s  _extremely likely_  that Heirs will become Lords, but it’s not a guarantee. “

Granger is staring at him, but says nothing. Finally, Niles asks, “But what does being a Lord  _mean_?”

“Borrowed, not given. Earned, not taken,” Liam says, looking serious for the first time. “Magic isn’t nice. It’s  _dangerous_ , and people like to pretend that it’s only dark arts that lash out at you, but that’s not true. The root of all magic is the same, and it can all turn its back at you. If you, if any of you did something,” he looks to the muggleborns, “if you made the magic mad, summoned something that shouldn’t have been summoned, or made an inadvisable oath, you would be the one who would suffer the consequences.”

“Purebloods are protected from that,” Raina says quietly. “We suffer magical injuries, of course, but nothing truly terrible, nothing that would curse our children, nothing that would mean the end to our lines, our land, or our blood.”

Georgianna throws up her hands, clearly fed up with all of them. “ _Why_?”

“Because Lords and Ladies paint great big targets on our backs,” Draco say, and everyone shifts to look at him. “ _We_ are the root of our family’s magic. Should someone under my protection, be it someone that shares my noble blood or simply a member of a family who has sworn fealty to my family, incur the magic’s wrath, then I will be the one it attacks. I have the strength of my family’s magic, of generations of excellent breeding and tradition and  _sacrifice_  on my side, and it is likely that I will survive it while those under my protection would not. But surviving it remains my burden, not theirs.”

“I’m a Goyle and a Malfoy,” Markel says quietly, eyes bright, “I’m doubly protected. If for some reason I made the magic mad and Lord Goyle couldn’t protect me, Professor Malfoy would.”

He can see they still don’t understand, can see Granger thinks they’re off their rocker, so he says, “If Potter had had a Lord when Voldemort tried to kill him, he wouldn’t have gotten that cursed scar. James Potter would have gotten the backlash, and it probably would have killed him, but  _Harry_ wouldn’t have it, understand? Those types of curses are the things having a lord protects you against.” He considers this, and the prophecy has become common knowledge in the years since the war, so he doesn’t feel bad about adding, “That’s probably why Voldemort didn’t go after Neville, actually.”

Granger’s so frustrated she’s red. He can’t even enjoy it because they’ve said it so plainly, how can she not understand? She stands and slams her hands on the counter, “ _What_  are you talking about?”

The children jump, and trade little grins, because if nothing else seeing their cool and calm Arithmancy professor lose her temper is absolutely worth the lost hours from their afternoon.  Draco takes a deep breath, and forces himself  _to try being patient for once._

“Voldemort,” Markel says, surprising Draco and speaking with a renewed urgency, “explain it to them using Voldemort.” One of his favorite things that have happened since the war is that people aren’t afraid to use his name anymore.

Marilyn stares. “Cousin?”

“Tell them what he wasn’t,” Markel says, “so they know what we are.”

Raina and Marilyn trade confused looks. “What are you talking about?”

He looks to Draco, who raises a hand, “No, I understand.” It’s not something they like to talk about, any of them, but Markel is right.

“ _Lord_  Voldemort,” Granger says, considering, “ _Heir_ of Slytherin.”

Draco’s lips thin, but he nods. “Yes. Now – now okay,” he waves his wand and a dozen silver figures pour out from the end of it. “There is a connection, between lords and their vassals, right?” Silver strings connect the silver figures to one of the gold figures. “It’s a one way connection. I know when they die, and it’s by this connection that my magic can protect them  _if, and only if_ , they do something to initiate the,” he pauses, because there has to be words for this, language for something that Draco has carried with him his entire life, but he can’t think of it.

“It’s like the protective wards around Hogwarts,” Liam says. “They’re always  _there_ , but they’re inactive until something triggers them. A lord’s magic won’t affect anyone it’s connected too  _unless_  that person’s magic triggers it. Then all it does is  _protect_  that person. That’s how the connection between lords and vassals is supposed to work.”

Draco nods his thanks. “Yes, exactly. Voldemort was not a lord. He did not serve in the House of Lords and Ladies, he had no vassals, and, most importantly, blood of Slytherin or not,  _the magic didn’t choose him_. People could swear fealty to him from dawn until dusk, and the magic still wouldn’t take notice. So, what he did was he created the dark mark. Something that’s  _almost_  like the connection shared by lords and their people, except for all the ways in which it is nothing like it, of course.”

“Voldemort  _wanted_  to be a lord really badly,” Raina says quietly, “but the magic knew, it knew better than all of us, and it was never going to recognize him.”

The muggleborns looks solemn and even Granger has gone contemplative rather than combative. “What does being a lord really mean?” she asks. “Politically speaking.”

Oh, merlin. All the purebloods slump in their seats, and Draco points his wand at them. “Don’t even think about it, up you go. I’m not writing out the family trees and alliances of all the pureblood families on my own. Think of it like a pop quiz.”

The four of them are glaring at him, but they drag themselves to their feet and begin drawing out the current blood maps. Draco  _could_  conjure the self-updating one he has in quarters, but the last thing he needs is a reputation of being nice.

It’s easier after that. Explaining alliances and duties and blood feuds are something they’re all used to doing. Those concepts that change and have to be re-explained so at least there’s a language for it.

Granger doesn’t say anything else for the rest of the lesson, letting the muggleborn kids ask all the questions. She does keeps  _staring_  at him however, which is more than a little unnerving.

~

When he wakes up at three in morning to someone sitting on his legs, he doesn’t even have to open his eyes to check. He knows exactly who it is. “Luna,” he groans, arm thrown over his eyes, “couldn’t this have waited until  _dawn_? At least?”

“Hermione came and told me about the lesson you gave,” she says, which means the answer to his question is a very firm no. “I’d never thought of it, before, but – my mom never declared fealty to your family, did she?”

He lowers his arm and opens his eyes. It’s too dark to see her face, and he can’t reach his wand without her getting off of him, which she clearly doesn’t plan on doing. “No,” he says, “she didn’t.”

“And she’d renounced her family in Japan,” she continues, and Draco  _really_  wishes he could see her face. “So she didn’t have a lord or lady, did she?”

“No,” he repeats, “she didn’t. But Luna, my father  _did_  consider her family, as did I. Just because she didn’t swear loyalty doesn’t mean she wasn’t one of us.”

“The magic didn’t, though.” It’s hard to tell just from her legs on his legs, but he thinks she might be shaking. “The magic didn’t think she belonged to anyone. Is that – is that why she,” Luna pauses and takes a deep breath. When she speaks again she sounds like when she was four years old, back when they were kids and before the second war tore everyone apart all over again. “Do you think if she’d had a lord she still would have died?’

Draco closes his eyes. He  _wants_  to say yes, to say nothing on this earth could have spared her mother, wants to spare  _Luna_  the wondering and the wanting. “I don’t know,” he says, keeps his voice quiet and gentle in the darkness between them. “I don’t know what spell she used, if it was something that our family magic could have saved her from, or if it was just something small, something that was terrible enough to kill her but not something that would have triggered our protective magic.”

“Oh,” Luna says, then sniffs, and dear merlin he hates it when she  _cries._

He pushes himself up and pulls her into his chest, tries to hug her like his father used to hug him. Lucius was tall and strong and  _safe_. For all his other faults, his father loved him and protected him, and maybe his home life wasn’t always easy, but he never doubted that he was  _loved_. He tries to hug Luna like that, tries to let her know by his arm around her waist and hand cradling the back of her head that she’s not alone.

He doesn’t know if he’s successful, if that’s still something you can say with a hug when you’re not children anymore, but she clings to him even as her tears drip down his neck, so he figures it’s not a total loss.

~

He _should_ be using his free period to grade the truly awful potions essays his fourth year Ravenclaws had submitted.

(“They’re entirely accurate!” Byron had promised. They were also twice the length requirement and went into so many offshoot tangents that Draco wanted to rip his hair out. Only a Ravenclaw could start at the uses for dragon scales and end up at thirteenth century German immigration law.)

Instead, Potter has just stormed into his office. He knocks his inkwell to the ground, causing it to shatter rather dramatically, and then shouts, “What the bloody hell do you think you’re playing at, Malfoy?”

It’s just his luck that Potter finally goes off the deep end and knocks his inkwell  _off_  the desk instead of on it. If Potter had spilled ink all over those exhausting essays he may have just kissed him. “Good evening, Potter.” He considers the ink and broken glass on his floor. A repario and scourgify would take care of it, but honestly what’s the fun in that? “Nice weather we’re having.”

“Malfoy,” Potter thunders, but Draco holds up a hand to shut him up. Miraculously, the Gryffindork falls silent.

He’s just gone over this charm with Fillius. It’s difficult and requires too much energy. Wasting the magic on something so small would be just about be criminal. He pulls out his wand and waves it in quick, neat circle over the spill that leaves a trail of bright red sparks behind. “Tempus!” he casts. The magic leaves him in a rush as the inkwell and ink come together again and fly back onto his desk. Before the spell can go any further he shouts, “Finite!”

Draco slumps back into his chair, grinning. He should probably take a shot of pepper up if he doesn’t want to fall asleep in the middle of his five o’clock class, but that was awesome.

“Are you crazy?” Potter demands, crouching down in front of his chair so he can look him in the eyes. “What spell was that?”

“Controlled time travel,” he yawns. “It’s the predecessor to the time turner, an incredible waste of energy, and comparably quite ineffective since it’s impossible to cast on yourself.” He looks at the inkwell and smirks, “It’s bloody cool, though.” Potter almost smiles at him. Draco doesn’t want to address that at all, so he asks, “Didn’t you come here to yell at me for something?”

“Well, you were always excellent at ruining everything,” Potter says wryly. He’s about to respond with something caustic when Potter balances with one hand on Draco’s knee and presses his other hand against Draco’s forehead. “Are you sure you’re all right? It looks like that spell really tired you out, which isn’t an easy thing to do.”

Because Draco’s mind is a traitorous bastard, it conjures up a bunch of ways that Potter could tire him out. Since Draco is an  _adult, damnit_ , he pushes both those thoughts and Potter’s hand aside. “I’m fine, it’s just an advanced spell. Not all of us have endless wells of magic like you.”

Potter’s hand is  _still_  on his knee. “I spoke to Hermione. And Luna, and Neville.”

“Okay?” He has no idea where this is going. “I would assume you all speak fairly often, considering.”

Potter rolls his eyes, but it almost seems more fond than irritated, which is a terrifying thought. “I know about the defense classes Neville and Luna have been running, and the lessons you’ve been giving Hermione, and I wanted to be mad, I  _am_ mad, but Neville kind of explained it to me, and even Hermione said maybe I should listen to you.”

Draco stares. “What? Are you talking about the defense lessons? My kids are scared of you, I’m pretty sure if you made them face a bogart, half the time it would turn into you. How can anyone  _learn_  that way? Look at Neville. He’s not actually that horrible at potions, it’s just Snape terrified him.” Potter’s paled, likely at the comparison to Snape, which was probably unfair of him, considering. “It’s not your fault, he says. “Mostly. They just can’t trust you, and they’re certainly never going to like you.”

“That’s not what I –” he pauses, “Wait, why can’t they trust me?”

Draco snaps his mouth closed. He doesn’t know how to say it without this ending in a duel or a punch to the face, how to tell Potter that he’s the worst kind of blood traitor when Draco’s half sure he doesn’t even know it. There was no reason to tell him as a kid, and after war he’d made it more than clear he had no plans to follow the ancient ways. “It’s complicated,” he says finally.

“Am I a lord?” he challenges, eyes sparking.

“You are not,” Draco hisses, standing so Potter’s hand finally slides off his knee. “You are  _barely_  an heir, at best.” Indignation wells up inside of him. He remembers Potter ignoring his outstretched hand at eleven because he was an ignorant excuse for a noble that knew nothing of their traditions. “You know what, Potter, what you are is a  _disgrace_. Do you think your family crossed the sea and settled here so you could turn your back on everything they bled and died for? Screw you, you shouldn’t even be able to call yourself a noble, you’ve honored no alliances.” He thinks back to that day and seethes, because Draco was a Malfoy and he was a Potter, and even if they hadn’t been friends they weren’t supposed to have been enemies, not then, not in those peaceful years between the wars when alliances were supposed to matter. “You’re barely even a pureblood.”

“I’m not a pureblood,” Potter grits out, hand already reaching into his robes for his wand, probably unconsciously. “My mother was a muggleborn, in case you’ve forgotten.”

Oh merlin, please tell him that Potter isn’t basing the social status of his mother on an argument they got in as teenagers. “Lily Potter was also Lady Potter, your family’s preference for informality non withstanding, and she was a  _respectable_ witch who married into a noble family. Your assumption that her blood in your veins would make you anything less than pure is an  _insult_  to her memory and her sacrifice.” The first war had changed things, changed language and prejudices, but no war was powerful enough to change power and blood. He might not have understood that as a kid, but he certainly does now.

He walks away after that, furious at the both of them, and shockingly Potter lets him.

That was a stupid argument to get into, one he’s kept himself from having for years, and he’s absolutely certain he’s going to regret it.

He’s certain Potter is going to  _make_  him regret it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hope you liked it! 
> 
> as always, feel free to follow/harass me at: shanastoryteller.tumblr.com
> 
> i post writing progress reports under the tag "progress report" so you can know what i'm working on :)


	5. Chapter 5

He’s woken up at one in the morning by a forceful knocking at his door. Considering he’s just gotten into an explosive argument with Potter, it could anyone. Luna, to sigh at him but call him cousin anyway. Neville, to come and look at him in a vaguely disapproving fashion. Granger, to rip the skin from his face and set him on fire.

What’s he’s not expecting is to open his door and find Ronald Weasley standing there with two bottles of firewhiskey.

“Those aren’t as flammable as you’d think,” he says immediately. “All commercially sold alcohol has fire dampening spells applied to it. Too many drunken accidents.”

Weasley blinks. “I wasn’t going – I’m not Hermione!” He looks down at the bottles consideringly. “Do they really?”

“My grandfather spearheaded the legislation personally. Our family has had to rebuild more than one greenhouse because of it.”

Weasley stares. “Why didn’t you just tell your employees to stop getting drunk on the job?”

“What makes you think it was the employees?” he retorts. “By historical record, my great aunt Vela personally blew up one greenhouse and two potions labs. During her school years alone.”

“Huh,” Weasley says, and thrusts a bottle of firewhiskey at him. Draco stares at it, uncomprehending. “Are you going to take it or not?”

“Why on earth would I?” he asks, but accepts the proffered bottle.

Weasley uncorks his bottle and takes a long pull, smoke oozing out of his ears. “Because we’re going to ignore the fact that our families have a three centuries long blood feud and have a frank, adult conversation with no cursing or malignant comments towards each other.”

“Merlin’s balls, Weasley,” Draco says faintly, uncorking his own bottle. “Why?”

He points his bottle at Draco, cheeks already flushed with alcohol. “Because Harry has been bloody  _moping_  all over our place. I’m having flashbacks to fifth year, and that’s  _just not on_ , do you hear me, Malfoy?” He pauses, and then sighs. “I’m going to call you Draco. If we’re going to get smashed and discuss politics, we might as well be on a first name basis.”

“This is my worst nightmare,” Draco informs him, taking a large gulp of the burning liquid. He’s going to need send an elf to his private stores by the time the night is through.  

Ron pushes past him and looks around his sleek and opulent living quarters with a faint look of disgust. “I understand completely.”

~

He and Ron are sitting on the floor, their backs braced against the couches and bottles littered on the table in front of them.

Draco has an intense urge to drink until he dies. “He can’t have  _no_ idea about his duties. He’s a Potter! The Potter Heir!”

“He’s the last Potter. Who was going to teach him?” Ron asks. “Our family doesn’t do that stuff anymore. Honestly, I probably don’t even know the half of it.” Draco picks up on the trace of longing, and oh, isn’t that interesting. “I know it’s important, or whatever, to you lot. But the rest of us don’t really get it.”

“You can’t feel the magic anymore,” Draco says, his body numb. He tries to keep the horror off his face, but by Ron’s grimace he’s not the successful. It makes sense, too much sense, all of the purebloods asking themselves what was  _wrong_  with the lot of them, and this was it.

Ron sighs and takes another long drink before saying, “I don’t even know what that means, Draco. So, no, I guess not.”

He’s still staring at Ron, and it’s probably gone past the point of rude into unsettling, but he can’t stop. He knows the weight and taste of his family’s magic, can sense a Lestrange at fifty paces, feels the ancient magics of the castle humming beneath his feet, the whole grounds nearly pulsing with the combined family magic that has been sunken into the earth generation after generation.

“Your family’s magic feels like fire,” he says, and he shouldn’t be saying this, alcohol non withstanding they still have a blood feud, and it’s considered rude regardless. Families say it’s the hair or the nose that’s their defining characteristic. But the truth is it’s the feel of magic in the air. “It’s crackling, almost. Like embers. Sparks. It feels like the color of your hair, and candle fire on your fingertips.” Ron is the one staring now, mouth open and firewhisky forgotten. “My great great grandfather once wrote that meeting the lord of the Weasley family was like stepping into an inferno.”

The empty bottle falls from Ron’s loose fingers and rolls across the floor. He clenches his hands and says. “What – why – do you know why our families have a blood feud?”

“You don’t know?” he sputters. That would certainly explain a lot, but how can a whole family just  _forget_  the start of a blood feud?

“Everything from that time was lost,” Ron says. “It’s in our old manor, supposedly.”

“The one none of you can enter,” he rubs at his temples, and shit like this is what happens when oaths don’t get honored and alliances are broken. “I’m impressed it’s still standing, honestly.” He pauses, and it’s really shouldn’t still be standing, actually. “Has anyone  _tried_  to enter it?”

Ron scratches the back of his neck, “A great uncle, I think? But the wards killed him as soon as he stepped foot on the grounds, so no one was ever able to get his body.”

“What isn’t sacrificed willingly will be taken unwillingly,” Draco says grimly. Why does everyone think magic is all fun and games? It’s blood and pain, and anyone who thinks differently is an idiot.

Ron throws a cork at his head. “Saying vague and creepy stuff like that is why no one trusts you guys, you know.”

“Oh, is that all?” He flicks the cork back over. and Ron catches it before it can hit him in the face. “I thought it was the dark lords we kept following.”

“That doesn’t help,” Ron concedes, “but it’s mostly the ominous statements.”

He rolls his eyes, and it’s really none of his business, but if someone doesn’t tell them something, someone else is going to end up dead. “The Weasley line pre-dates the founders, Ron. It’s going to takes more than a handful of generations for the magic to forget you. It considers your debt overdue, and what you don’t give it will take. Your ancestors knew that when they broke their line. That’s why they closed up your manor to begin with.”

“That doesn’t answer my question,” Ron says, eyes focused. “Why do our families have a blood feud?”

It’s considered impolite to bring it up. If they’ve truly forgotten, he should get an intermediary like Neville or Pansy to deliver the terms of their feud. But that’s a lot of pomp and circumstance that he doesn’t have the energy for. “Our families had been allies for a long time. Never close, but amiable since we came over from France. A marriage contract was set up between my great grandfather and your great great aunt Rea, if I’m not mistaken. Days before the wedding, your lord announced that he would no longer be following the old ways and that your family would live as simple witches and wizards forever more. To have a lord marry your aunt regardless would have been an insult, so the engagement was annulled. Rea killed herself the next day. My great grandfather blamed your lord, your family blamed mine for annulling the engagement, we blamed you for entering into an engagement under false pretenses, you blamed us for being pompous, we called you arrogant, and then the next day my great grandfather – reportedly brokenhearted – enacted the blood feud.”

Ron continues staring at him for a long moment. “Bloody hell, what a mess. Why did we leave the House of Lords and Ladies so suddenly? It certainly doesn’t sound like we were planning on it.”

He points at Ron with his bottle. “That, I’m afraid, is a secret buried in your manor. No one knows, and the only way you’ll find out is by going there. But considering the magic is more interested in blood than playing nice, I wouldn’t recommend it.”

“Bloody hell,” he repeated, more mournful this time, and continues drinking.

Draco pulls his leg to his chest and rests his chin on his knee. While they’re talking about uncomfortable subjects, he has something else he wants to discuss, even if it gets him cursed. He’s not sure how to bring this up, because if he’s wrong it’s the equivalent to calling the man’s wife a simpleton. But he doesn’t think he’s wrong. He sends a prayer to his ancestors and barrels forward. “You know, Granger’s been coming to my muggleborn classes, and she’s been perfectly civil, and she’s quite smart, obviously, but I think, and don’t curse me for saying this, I think she may not know what blood is.”

Ron rolls his eyes, and doesn’t even move to hit him, which is nice. “She obviously does, what are you talking about?”

“I’m serious,” he says. “I _thought_  it was obvious, that I was just misunderstanding her, but I also thought all purebloods could feel magic, so I’m clearly capable of being wrong. It’s the way she keeps insisting she’s one of the muggles.”

“They did raise her,” Ron points out.

He shakes his head. “The Dursleys raised Potter, but that doesn’t make them one of us. I think Granger thinks she’s one of them because they raised her. I think she thinks our word for blood means the same as their word for it. Like,” he stops, struggling, because he doesn’t have words for this, for something he didn’t think needed to be explained.

Ron frowns, but then his face clears, and he’s apparently much smarter than Draco ever game him credit for. “Oh – oh you mean – no, I mean – well, I can see how she’d be confused,” he says defensively. “She didn’t know she wasn’t theirs until she was eleven. And they did raise her Draco, they love her, they are her parents. Even if they’re not her real parents.”

“That’s what I’m saying,” Draco insists. “She doesn’t understand that when we say blood we mean magic, because our magic is our blood. It’s family ties and alliances and literal blood soaked into the earth, bone buried in foundations. Blood isn’t blood. It’s magic. I bet she doesn’t know that most of the wizarding world doesn’t consider her birth parents her real parents because they may share the muggle concept of blood, but they don’t share  _magic._ I think that she thinks that we don’t differentiate. She thinks that when I say blood I mean the same things muggles do, the stuff flowing in our veins and genetics and all that rot.”

“But you don’t,” Ron says, eyebrows dipped together. “Obviously, you don’t. You mean the lines of magic, family magic, all of it.” He leans forward and puts his head in his hands, “She’s going to be so mad when she finds out she didn’t know something!”

Draco pats him on the back consolingly. An angry Hermione Granger isn’t a fate he wishes upon anyone. “You know you’re going to have to explain this to Potter too, right?”

“Harry doesn’t know either?” he asks, looking longingly toward one of the unopened bottles.

Draco hands it over. “If the cleverest witch of our generation hasn’t figured it out on her own, what makes you think Harry ‘Dunce’ Potter has?”

Ron slaps himself on the forehead and pulls out the cork with his teeth. It’s a good thing his wife’s parents are dentists.

~

He skips breakfast the next morning and drags himself to his first and favorite class of the day, banging open the door in a suitably dramatic fashion. His seventh year NEWTS class looks nearly as dead outside as he feels inside. “I am so hungover I want to die,” he announces briskly. “I’m going to sit at my desk and try not to vomit. The first team who brews me a successful hangover cure is exempt from homework for the rest of the semester.”

There’s a moment of complete stillness before they all start huddling together and flipping through their textbooks. Mariana, a Hufflepuff muggleborn who’s notorious for her late night parties and early morning study sessions, already has a flock of eager students surrounding her.

He’s a little disappointed someone didn’t just throw a bezor at his head and call it a day, but on the bright side they may actually learn something about designing potions from scratch.

~

He’s on his way to the kitchens for lunch in an honestly humiliating bid to avoid Potter and his posse for a few more hours when he’s cornered by three fourth year Ravenclaws girls. The manic look in all their eyes makes him slightly concerned for their wellbeing in addition to his own. “Ladies,” he greets, raising an eyebrow. “Is there something I can help you with?”

“We heard about what you did with the seventh years this morning,” she says. “We want to experiment making our own potions too!”

“What.”

Dacia Zabini pouts at him in a way she almost certainly learned from her aunt, “Could you start a potions club, pretty please, Lord Malfoy?”

“With all my spare time?” he snaps.

The girls are unfazed. “We’ll do all the work ourselves,” the first one continues, “we just need you to supervise us in the potions lab. You can do your grading while we work. Please, Lord Malfoy?”

“It’s Professor Malfoy in these halls,” he corrects, and he can already tell he’s going to regret this decision. “Very well. On one condition. You must open your club to all years and houses. Understand?”

He’s going to take all their jumping around and high pitched squealing as agreement.

~

Draco is flung out on the couch in his quarters, reading his first quarterly reports on his holdings from the goblins. It’s in very neat, small handwriting and so overly complicated he has the urge to call up Terry Boot and whine at him until he puts his arithmancy mastery to use and explains it to him.

But goblins are fickle, and proud, and a bunch of assholes. Draco can respect that. They’ll never take him seriously if he can’t understand his own accounts, regardless of how convoluted and unnecessarily detailed their reports are. Milly pops into existence next to him, “You is having a visitor at the door, Master Draco.”

“Who is it?” he asks, because if he stops in the middle of auditing the main business account then he’ll have to start over again from the beginning, and it’s painful enough only doing it once. If it’s someone he can get away with ignoring, that would be preferable.

“Heir Longbottom,” she says. “Shall I be telling him you is busy, Master?”

Bloody hell. Well, best to get it over with. “No, that will be all Milly. Very good.”

She gives him a pleased little bow and vanishes. He pushes himself up and onto his feet. He hopes that Neville won’t challenge him to a duel. The Longbottoms and the Potters have never held an official alliance, and since Neville is an Heir, and Draco doesn’t currently have one of his own, he’d have to fight Neville personally. He’ll never admit it out loud, but that’s not a duel he’s confident he could win.

He opens the door, bracing himself. “Finally,” Neville says impatiently. “Can I catch a ride with you to the House? Gran’s finally taking me to one, and she was supposed to pick me up in the carriage, but she got tied up in a meeting and told me to meet her there. But she gets irritable if I take the floo to official functions, and merlin forbid I fly there like a commoner.”

Draco stares. “What the bloody hell are you talking about?”

“It’s the full moon?” Neville returns, eyebrow raised.

There’s a moment when they just stare at each other, and then Draco goes, “ _Fuck!_ ” and slams the door in his face. He opens it again a moment later to add, “Yes, you’re welcome ride with me. I’ll meet you at the front of the castle in,” he checks the grandfather clock next to the fireplace, and at least Neville had come to ask early so he’s not completely screwed, “an hour.” He closes the door again, pauses, and opens it, “You’re not wearing that, are you?”

“No,” Neville says, lips twitching, “I am not wearing my teaching robes to a formal meeting.” Draco scowls at him and shuts the door a final time.

He cannot believehe forgot tonight was the full moon, and therefore the monthly meeting of the House of Lords and Ladies. This is what getting into fights with Potter and drinking with Weasleys does to him. He sends Bip to the manor to prep the carriage, but there’s still the matter of his date.

He already knows neither Pansy nor Blaise are free this evening, and likely each think the other is going to the meeting with him. He tells Milly to set out his robes since she has a good eye for it, then goes striding to the professor’s common room. He doesn’t show up stag, as a rule, and he’s not about to start now. He bursts inside and commands, “Loony, attend the monthly congregation with me.”

There are only four people in the room. Luna blinks at him, blue eyes so dark they almost look black. “Don’t you usually go with Blaise?”

“He’s busy,” he says, unwilling to say he’s an idiot who forgot that it was today. By the way Flitwick and Minerva are studiously focused on their chess game, he bets they’ve both guessed that already. He thinks he liked it better when they couldn’t read him so easily.

Granger crosses her arms. “What are you on about? Also, you could be nicer about asking Luna to do things! You can’t just go ordering people around!”

“He can, actually,” Luna says mildly, and gives an odd half smile. Dread pools into the bottom of Draco’s stomach. She looks like her mother when she does that, and Pandora was, among many other things, a devious woman. “Of course, cousin. But perhaps you should take Hermione instead?”

Minerva’s head snaps up, staring at Luna in horror. Filius doesn’t look up from the board and moves a piece perilously close to her queen. “Why?” he and Granger demand at the same time.

“You keep saying the books and theory aren’t good enough,” Luna says to Hermione, “and this is a formal meeting of the House of Lords and Ladies. When will you ever get a chance to attend again?” She looks from Granger to him and adds, “She might learn something.”

This is such a bad idea. This entire day is apparently dedicated to bad ideas. “Fine,” he snaps, then addresses Granger. “If you want to walk among the natives, you best act like one. No arguing, no causing trouble. You can throw a fit about it all when we get back if you must, but while we’re there you treat it like the muggleborn classes. Understand?”

“I understand,” she says, glaring at him, and this is going to be such a miserable evening.

“You don’t have anything to wear,” he says.

“I have–” she begins.

He holds up his hand, “That wasn’t a question.” He snaps his fingers, and Milly appears beside him. “Professor Granger will be accompanying me this evening. Find something suitable in my mother’s closet and help her get ready.”

“Yes, Master Draco,” Milly says, and disappears in the middle of her curtsy.

Granger is already purple in indignation. “Save it,” he says. “We work together, it’s not like you’re low on opportunities to yell at me. Luna, help her out,” he adds, and waits for his cousin to nod before sweeping out of there as suddenly as he’d came.

Why does he keep allowing these things to happen? Everything was so much easier when he and the Gryffindor crowd spent the years after the war pretending the other didn’t exist. This is exhausting.

~

When Draco descends the steps of Hogwarts, Granger is already there and waiting for him. Her hair is shining and tumbling down around her, longer than he last saw it, but it’s possible it’s just an effect of her curls being looser. When he sees what Milly chose, he has to grin. “You look like a proper lady,” he greets.

She rolls her eyes, but not even her stubbornness can hide her fascination with her borrowed clothes. She’s wearing a fortune, a tight bright red acromantula silk gown and thin outer robe, clasped only right below her sternum to show off the dress with a solid gold broach. The outer robe is delicately crocheted and thin enough that its nearly transparent, though a powerful warming charm was integrated into the thread as it was spun, so that the wearer will remain pleasantly cozy no matter the weather. Walburga Black developed that particular spell herself.

“Sorry I’m late!” Neville yelps, running down the steps, “I was talking to Harry – wow,” he says, wide eyed, “Hermione, you look great! You’re going to give everyone a heart attack wearing that dress though,” he adds, but he sounds more approving than anything else.

Granger looks down, forehead wrinkling. “Why?”

“My mother wore that dress on only a few occasions,” Draco says, smiling. “It meant she was crosswith someone in the House, and that she and my father were out for blood. I imagine Milly chose it so you’d feel more comfortable in your house colors, but some of the old crowd has very  _particular_  memories associated with that dress.”

Before Granger can do more than frown at him, Neville adds, “She’s missing something. Earrings?”

“What the point? They’ll get lost in her hair unless she puts it up,” he argues, but concedes Neville has a point. He touches his wand in his sleeve, and in the next moment he holds out a necklace of gold and polished obsidian. “This belonged to my great grandmother on my father’s side. It has a preservation and unbreakable charm on it, but be gentle none the less.”

“Thank you,” she says, taking it from him with cautious fingers and clasping it around her neck. “Luna said we were taking a carriage?”

“Status symbol,” he explains, because there’s no reason  _not_  to speak plainly and turn this into a learning experience for her. “It’s looked down upon to arrive in anything but a family carriage because it implies there’s something shameful about the state of yours. The more impressive the carriage, the more impressive your family.”

“Is yours impressive?” she asks, but there’s no malice in the question, only curiosity.

Neville answers before he can, “Very.” He bounces on the balls of his feet and admits, “I could have hitched a ride with someone else, but I’ve been dying to ride in your carriage.”

Granger crosses her arms, suspicious. “What’s so special about it?”

Draco raises his hand and snaps twice. Almost immediately the air is filled with the sounds of pounding hooves as his carriage rounds the corner and stops in front of them. It’s a very well crafted carriage, black stained mahogany, with the Malfoy family crest carved into the doors, and gold detailing spelled to shine even in the dimmest of lights. That’s not the interesting part though. That would be the creature pulling it.

The midnight black horse is normal enough looking, tall and strong with a dark coat that gleams almost blue. Except, of course, for the enormous wings protruding from his back. The pegasus tosses his head and stands even taller under their eyes. This is the first and only time he can honestly say he’s truly shocked Granger. She’s wide eyed with her mouth hanging open. He takes a moment to savor it before saying, “Meet Nox. It’s not a terribly original name, I know, but I did name him when I was a child. He’s worked for my family for over twenty years.”

“Sections of the Malfoy land are preserved for pegasi mating and birthing grounds, and are warded off against poachers as well as some other unpleasant predators,” Neville explains, eagerly holding out a hand for Nox to inspect. After a moment of deliberation, he nudges his large head in Neville’s hand and allows the wizard to pet him.

“As such, one pegasus from each generation works for my family in exchange for this protection,” Draco finishes. “Their natural lifespans are about three times that of a witch or wizard, so they’re not separated from their flock forever, if you were worried about that.”

Granger closes her mouth. He doesn’t know for sure that she was going to go on tirade about him enslaving creatures, but if so he didn’t want to hear it. Nox is an incredibly powerful and incredibly intelligent magical creature. If he didn’t want to be working for the Malfoy family, he would have flown off long ago. Honestly, that’s why he'd had such little patience and was such a brat when it came to care of magical creatures in school. He was accustomed to magical creatures that could take care of themselves.

“He’s beautiful,” she says softly, fingers twitching towards him.

Draco gives them both a couple more minutes to admire and pet Nox before clapping his hands and saying, “Come on. If we’re late, Augusta will be cross with me, which is never pleasant.”

He helps Granger into the carriage first, then Neville, and climbs in after both of them. The door swings shut on its own. Nox takes off at a full gallop, knowing where he needs to take Draco on a full moon.

“Wait a minute,” Granger says nervously. “If Nox has wings, does that mean–”

She doesn’t have the chance to finish that question before the carriage is lifted off the ground, Nox beating his powerful wings to propel them into the air. Neville squashes his face against the window while Granger stays determinedly in the center of the seat.

“Don’t worry,” he says. “Once he’s gotten us high enough, it’s a smoother ride than it would be on land.”

“Delightful,” she says, and carefully edges her way to the window to watch Hogwarts become smaller and smaller below them.

Draco hides a smile. Slowly, painfully slowly, he thinks she’s discovering that not all aspects of pureblood tradition are repugnant to her.

Of course, that’s likely to all be destroyed after a full night in the House, but he can enjoy it while it lasts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hope you liked it!
> 
> as always, feel free to follow/harass me at: shanastoryteller.tumblr.com
> 
> i post writing progress reports under the tag "progress report" so you can know what i'm working on :)


	6. Chapter 6

The flight is short. Pegasi can only be reliable out-flown by dragons, after all, and Nox is talented enough that the carriage lands smoothly. Draco steps out first, then helps Neville out, then Granger. Nox gallops off into the air, likely back to his manor until he calls for him again.

“Stonehenge?” Granger asks, tilting her head to the side. The massive, ancient structure looks almost silver in the moonlight.

“Not quite,” Neville says, beaming. He claps Draco on the shoulder. “Thanks for letting me come with you. I’ll see you on the other side.” He heads around to the opposite curve of the circle, careful not to step too close until he finds the right spot.

“Where’s he going?” She frowns, “Where is everyone?”

He holds out his arm, and she takes it, stepping up beside him. He leads her to the stone doorway in front of them, “Come now, Granger, haven’t you learned anything about our world yet? Nothing is as it seems.”

She opens her mouth, probably to yell at him, but they step into the stone doorway and a wall of black flames bursts to life behind them, and a wall of white flame surges up in front of them. They’re boxed in, stone on two sides, and flames on the others. “Malfoy?” she whispers, her grip bruising. “What’s going on?”

“Don’t panic,” he says. “You’ve faced something like this before, haven’t you?”

She relaxes slightly. “In first year, it was Snape’s challenge. Do we have to solve a riddle? I’m good at riddles.”

He shakes his head. “Snape had never been here of course, but he’s heard of it. Trying to recreate what he could never have. Pathetic.”

Draco presses his hand against the rough stone, feeling for a sharp edge. Once he finds one, he leans against it and slices open his palm. “Draco!”

“It’s fine.” He reaches forward and pushes his bloody hand through the fire. His blood slides from his skin into the flames, and the white fire turns red, spreading out from his hand until the whole of the flames are a bright, natural red shot through with orange. “There. It’s just a normal fire now. Would you like to take care of it? Or perhaps throw me into it?”

“Occidere!” she casts, rolling her eyes. On one hand, it’s over-kill to use the predecessor to the avada kedavra curse to put out a fire, but on the other hand, it’s incredibly cool to watch the pale green smoke enfulge the flames and eventually dissipate. She slides her wand back into her sleeve and tosses her hair over her shoulder, giving him a look that puts her right at home with a bunch of snobbish purebloods.

“Excellent,” he grins and winks at her, and before she has a chance to respond to that, he leads her through the entrance. He watches her face, watching for the moment she sees through the illusion.

The area within Stonehenge is much, much larger than it appears on the outside. It’s not abandoned dirt, but instead a gorgeous, manicured garden. They aren’t alone. Couples are stepping through the stone doorways of Stonehenge. Lords, Ladies, and Heirs rubbing at their hands even though the magic heals them as soon as they step through. Neville is already at Augusta’s side, an attentive and handsome presence at her elbow as she leads them up the garden path.

“That’s a castle,” Grange says, looking up at the towering structure that the long stone paths leads to.

“A small one,” he agrees. “No one lives there, after all. It’s mostly just used for these meetings.”

She matches his pace as they walk towards it. “It looks old.”

“Helga Hufflepuff singlehandedly constructed this castle over a thousand years ago after the previous structure was destroyed in a magical backlash. It’s a little older than Hogwarts. She built this first, which is why she was the architect for the Hogwarts castle.” He nearly trips when Granger stops in her tracks, and he looks back to see her giving him the strangest look he’s ever seen. He hopes she’s not planning to set him on fire. He gently tugs her forward and attempts to push his smirk into a smile in case she curses him for it. “Not everything is in Hogwarts, A History. If you can go the whole evening without embarrassing me, I’ll show you the West Tower. That’s where the library is.”

“I’m holding you to that,” she says, carefully lifting her red silk gown to walk up the steps of the castle. “What happens tonight?”

He leads her past the great hall into a side chamber. This castle wasn’t built for beauty or splendor. It was built for practicality, it was built in need, in desperation, it was built singlehandedly by a young witch who had nothing but her name and refused to let it die.

The meeting room is the largest in the castle. In the center is a large oval table, large enough to sit five hundred people.

Of course, far less than that are here tonight.

“We’ll convene for our meeting here first. Once it’s in session, don’t speak. Only Lords and Ladies may speak – if an Heir has something to contribute, they may tell their Lord or Lady, and they will choose whether or not it needs to be said. But everyone else will simply listen. Understand?” Granger nods. He pulls out her chair for her, then sits beside her. No one says anything, quietly going to their seats. Draco may not be allies with all these people, but he knows them, of course. “After, there will be dancing and drinks. You may speak then, although I would strongly advise that you do not _relax_. The social aspect of these meetings is often more treacherous than the actual session.”

Lord Parkinson is the last to arrive, his daughter and Heir sitting down beside them. Paige Parkinson is like Pansy condensed – all the terrifying power and airheaded demeanor pushed into a razor sharp reputation. Paige reminds him of Blaise’s mother, and he adores her, but he also stays far, far away from her.

Rosamund stands. As the eldest Lady present, she begins and dismisses these sessions. Many people hate the Lestranges, but it’s one thing to hate someone in the privacy of your own mind, and quite another to stand against a woman who was rumored to best Dumbledore in the ring until he refused to duel her any longer, back when they were very different people in a very different time.

“I, Lady Rosamund Lestrange, hereby call this meeting of the House of Lords and Ladies to session. All those in favor of continuing with these proceedings, say aye.”

“Aye,” Draco and dozens of others say.

Rosamund lifts her wand, and with a flick all the torches along the walls glow a little brighter. A large scroll appears in front of her, and she unrolls it with an intimidating snap of the parchment.

“So mote it be. Let’s begin!”

~

Granger listens with rapt attention, but most of the meeting must be boring, at least for her. It’s minutia about alliances, Rosamund pulling up a blood map and all the lords confirming their alliances have been maintained. A couple people have new alliances to add, but that’s not terribly surprising. The war pitted many people against each other, and after the dust settled, contracts were drawn up and Lords and Ladies took on new families who wished to publicly associate themselves with more favorable nobles. Draco hadn’t had to deal with that, thank merlin. He did quietly take a couple of families from the Notts, but the less said of that the better.

Next is the slate for the upcoming round of Wizengamot voting. Lady Eliza Greengrass rattles off a list of the upcoming bills, and gives a short summary of each. There’s heated debate over the newest wand tracking spell that’s being submitted as a required component of all future wands. Lord Ollivander is against it of course, although Lady Patil points out that it doesn’t do much more than the registration of magic required to get an appiration lesson. Ollivander nearly goes purple in the face at that, and goes on a twenty minute rant that involves a lot of gesticulating. Draco has a sturdy grasp on advanced arithmancy, he has to, if he ever plans on taking the formal examinations to become a charms master, but everything Ollivander is saying is flying way over his head.

Granger is practically vibrating in her seat, biting at her lip. Draco shakes his head, and she relaxes, although the grip she has on the edge of the table is a little concerning.

“Lord Ollivander,” he says, “I’m afraid most of us aren’t up to your level of mastery. Perhaps a simpler explanation would suffice?”

The old man turns his piercing blue eyes on him and cracks his aging face into a grin. “Ah, the young thief speaks.” Draco stiffens, because he has no idea what he’s talking about, he’s never crossed the Ollivanders. Their families have amiable for generations. “I do hope my niece is causing you as much trouble as she causes us.”

Oh. He’s talking about Markle’s friend, Andrea, the first ever Ollivander to be sorted in Slytherin.

His heart rate settles back to normal and he grins. “She’s a model student, I’m afraid. She clearly didn’t take after you.”

Ollivander barks out a laugh, “Oh give her time, give her time. She’ll be your worst nightmare before you know it.” The old man scratches at his beard and says, “All right, this new spell is a terrible bloody idea because it interferes with the wand’s natural magic, which is one thing when you’re our age and with our power, but for a kid? One just starting out? It will be a disaster. Additionally, I don’t care that the Ministry can track us anyway. They shouldn’t have a nice easy way to do it. If history has taught us anything, it’s that when evil comes knocking, the Ministry is the first to fall. They don’t need any help hunting people down the line when the next war comes.”

 _When_ the next war comes. Not if.

There will always be another war.

Sometimes it feels like being a Lord is just spending a lifetime preparing for a war you pray you won’t live long enough to see.

“Well, that’s very true,” Lady Nott says, the youngest lord or lady in the room besides him. She’s still twice his age, but he likes her anyway. She was a second cousin to the Lord before the war. After the war, with Lord Nott dead, she was chosen as the next head of the family. Draco thoroughly approves. “Who is in favor of it? It sounds like a brilliant mix of stupid and unnecessary to me.”

“It’s well intentioned,” Augusta says, speaking for the first time. “Although horribly misguided. It’s meant as a safety measure against crime. Of course, that assumes that a criminal would be stupid enough to use their own wand, knowing it could be traced back to them by spell residue alone, even without this additional tracking in place.”

“Well, if Lady Longbottom is against it, I am too,” Lord Brown says, giving the woman a saucy wink. Augusta tilts her nose in the air. Neville looks very uncomfortable.

“Motion to stall and block the bill?” Rosamund asks. Everyone agrees, although some are more enthusiastic about it than others. “Excellent. Those of us with Wizengamot seats will vote against the bill, but if it passes the first level of votes we’ll set up a lobby system. Minister Shackbolt is so annoyingly straight laced. You can’t bribe that man! Believe me, I’ve tried.”

“Almost makes you miss Fudge,” Lady Abbot says wistfully. “He was a train wreck, but for the most part he was an easily contained train wreck. He responded particularly well to blackmail and bribery.”

Everyone grumbles in agreement, and Granger looks positively scandalized. He supposes she believed that the supposedly ‘good’ families like the Abbots and Longbottoms and the Browns wouldn’t do something like bribe and blackmail government officials.

He’s almost disappointed. She was willing to do all manner of horrible things to achieve her ideals, was ruthless in her goal of peace. Why wouldn’t they be?

The rest of the meeting proceeds in a similar fashion, and once the list of upcoming bills has been exhausted, there’s talk of the new businesses that are being started and the ones that are, unfortunately, failing. Then the official business of the night ends as it always does. A silver dagger appears beside every Lord or Lady.

Draco suddenly remembers that Granger has no idea what’s about to happen. “Don’t panic, and be silent about it if you _must_ panic.”

He picks up the silver knife and drags it vertically down the length of his arm, and the confusion leaves her eyes and is replaces by horror. He glares at her, shaking his head when she opens her mouth. His blood flows into the center of the table, and the table looks and feels as if it’s perfectly level, but all their blood mingles and pools together until there’s a thin layer across the table. He’s just getting lightheaded at that point, and it wasn’t always like this. There was a time when each of them only had to give a few drops to fill this table, to keep the wards intact.

It was a time far in the past, but it _existed_. Now they all lose over a pint of blood each, Draco even more because he’s young and he can stand the loss. If things keep progressing as they are, they’re going to have to go back to ancient times and conclude every meeting with a human sacrifice.

The blood sinks into the table, and there’s a blinging flash of light as the wards are renewed and strengthened, as the magic takes what is given.

All else may fall, but the House of Lords and Ladies must stand. If every other bit of their culture and history is doomed to be overrun and forgotten, then this must remain.

This castle, this circle, this library, this magic. They give more blood than they can spare because the necessity of this place has never been more dire, because their history has never before been so close to being lost.

When the light dims, his arm is healed, not even a scar to show where he’d cut himself.

Scars are how the magic gives a warning. If anyone leave the House scarred, they would be smart to never return, lest they never leave it again.

They’re silent now, and Draco rolls his sleeve back down and offers his arm Granger. “To the garden,” he says, “and then you may speak.”

Heirs and wives and husbands pretend they’re not supporting the weight of the person they came with, pretend that this is normal when it is not. He won’t allow himself to lean against Granger, but as soon as they leave the castle he reaches into his sleeve and downs a blood replenishing potion.

“Do you have more of that?” Neville asks from right behind him, and Draco turns, cursing himself for not noticing.

“She won’t take it,” he warns, dropping a small vial in to his hand. “She never does.”

Neville shrugs, eyes pinched around the corners, “I might as well try. Thanks, Draco.”

He runs a hand through his hair then looks down at Granger, surprised at her continued silence. “You can speak now, you know.”

She’s staring him, lips pressed into a thin line and eyes narrowed. “I’m not sure where to begin,” she says finally. “I have no idea what just happened in there. I mean. the discussions I followed, more or less, although I had no idea you all kept such a close eye on everything. I’m shocked anything happens without you knowing about it.”

“It doesn’t, generally,” he says, and he can already see Lord Flint heading towards them. “Look, the social aspect is actually rather important. Can this wait until the dancing starts?”

Granger frowns, but gives a half-shrug that Draco is going to take as agreement. Lord Giles Flint comes up to them, a man who’s as large as his wife is tall. Draco has never liked him, ever since he was a small boy who was forced to be polite to him at his parents’ parties. “What are you doing all the way over here in the corners, my boy? It’s quite unlike you,” he booms, looking only at him and not addressing Granger at all.

“My apologies, Lord Flint,” he says, forcing himself to smile. “I had not intended to disappoint.”

“Can’t be helped, I suppose,” his wife says, her eyes barely flickering over Granger.

He wraps his arm around Granger’s waist and pulls her against his side, praying she doesn’t smack him for it. She doesn’t, instead leaning into him so Giles has no choice but to look at her or awkwardly turn his face halfway to the side, and Draco does his best to smother his amusement.

She really does fit in scarily well with his sort with that reckless pride of hers.

Muggleborn, wife of a blood-traitor, and Gryffindor or not, Granger is still his guest. She’s on the arm of Lord Malfoy, and Draco isn’t going to let anyone get away with disrespecting her, mostly because that means they’re disrespecting _him_.

Giles curls his upper lip in disgust. Draco asks, “Is there something in particular you wanted to discuss with me, Lord Flint?”

 “Yes, unfortunately,” he says. “I was hoping to ask a favor of you?”

“Of course you may ask,” he says pleasantly, and if this was Rosamund or even Augusta he would agree without question, but this is neither. The Flints are a strong, pure family who have never wavered in their devotion to magic itself. That doesn’t mean the family isn’t bursting with the nastiest sort of people Draco has ever had the misfortune of dealing with, and Giles is as rotten as the rest of them.

“One of the lesser families pledged to me has a daughter who whelped a mudblood child,” he says. “The mother has died, unfortunately. It is, of course, my duty to raise the child in my own family. Perhaps you could offer some advice? You have taken in several similarly tainted children, I understand.”

By some miracle, Granger keeps her mouth shut. “One must get new blood where one can,” he answers, “but then, the Flints have been so fortunate as to not suffer low numbers, unlike my own family.”

He hates this, and he hates himself, but he wants the same thing Flint wants. The unfortunate thing is Flint _knows_ he wants it, and will force him to practically beg to relieve him of a burden he doesn’t care for to begin with.

This is why wars are started, he thinks, there comes a point where no one can stand the bloody politics of it all anymore.

“The Malfoy clan is looking a little thin, isn’t it?” Giles asks, his smugness practically rolling off of him. Draco wants to strangle him.

His wife laughs and lays her hand on her husband’s shoulder like a pale, glittering spider. “Oh, but Lord Malfoy, surely you could take care of that problem with a well timed marriage? You are getting on in years, after all.”

He is _twenty four years old_ , and his parents may have gotten married the very summer after his mother graduated Hogwarts, but their marriage had been orchestrated by their parents, and besides that they’d actually liked each other. The only one of high enough standing he thinks he could tolerate being married to would be Pansy, and they’d figured out that was a horrible idea by the time they were fourteen. “Unfortunately, it’s not currently in the cards. It seems I must expand my family by more … unconventional means.”

Twenty minutes and seven more pointed remarks about his family line later, it’s decided that Draco will take charge of the toddler, and she will become a member of his House. He’s trying to figure out which cousin he can convince to take the child on when Granger kicks him in the shin.

“Ow!” he hisses, “What was that for?”

“I would like some explanations now, please,” she glares. It’s not a request. Light music fills the air, and there is a spaced cleared for dancing.

“You could have just asked, there was no need for violence,” he grumbles, leading Granger onto the dance floor in the middle of the garden. It’s early in the night, and there aren’t that many people out there, everyone instead sequestered in small groups with glinting glasses of wine in their hands. He feels a stab of envy, but he’s pretty sure if he doesn’t answer some of Granger’s questions soon he may just feel stabbed, period.

He’s pleasantly surprised to discover she knows the waltz. He wonders if she learned it for her wedding, since he can’t think of why else she’d know it. She certainly hadn’t known how to dance when they were kids at the Yule Ball. “What was the bit in the end, with the blood and the light?”

“This is a sacred place, Granger,” he twirls her around. “Can’t you feel it? It’s been around for over five thousand years. This has been a place of magic and harmony and _sacrifice_ for that long. It has been maintained as such because Lords and Ladies have given back what the magic has given us in the first place. We meet more often now, give more now because so much of us are afraid, but we truly only need to renew the wards once a year. Everything else is extra. Insurance, if you will.”

“Barbaric insurance,” she mutters.

He grins, all teeth. “Of course it is, Granger. Magic is barbaric. Nothing so beautiful comes for free.”

She’s silent for a while after that, and Draco clocks everyone around them as he turns them across the dance floor. They have a few confused or surprised sets of eyes on them, but nothing truly hostile, which he’s grateful for. He doesn’t think anyone would be stupid enough to start a duel here, of all places, but he’s certainly not willing to find out.

Granger huffs, seemingly at herself, and says, “I don’t understand. Flint said one of the witches he protects had birthed a muggleborn. But that’s impossible. By definition, muggleborns are born of muggles, not witches.”

“Ah,” Draco spins her again, thinking. “Well, no that’s not what he said. He said she’d had a _mudblood_. Flint’s rather old, and he was around for Grindelwald’s war, and his vocabulary hasn’t ever really updated. Nowadays, ever since Voldemort’s initial rise to power, mudblood has been used as an insult against muggleborns. But that wasn’t always the case. Up until then, mudblood was a slur not against muggleborns, but against magical children with a muggle parent and a magical parent.” She’s looking at him, brows furrowed in concentration, so he dips her while he thinks he can get away with it. “It makes more sense, I think, that way. Muggles dirtying the bloodlines, and all that, getting in the way of the magic. Muggleborns, on the other hand, are born of magic itself. Nothing dirty about that.”

“That’s not very nice to half-bloods,” Granger says. “I don’t think we should use it to refer to anyone.”

“I suppose not,” he agrees, “but that’s what Flint meant. Half-bloods are almost worse than squibs to the older generations. He may have made me grovel for the privilege of taking the child into my family, but the last thing he wants is a half-blood running around with the name Flint.”

“You’ve done this before?” she asks, “He said you had.”

Draco shrugs, uncomfortable with the way she’s staring at him. “Many people lost children in the war, my cousins included. When I show up with a child at their door, they’re amiable enough to raising them. I am their Lord, these are children, and the Malfoy line _is_ rather on the small side, comparatively. Besides, one good thing about Voldemort’s rein is that I didn’t grow up with that particular prejudice. My parents were much more concerned with raising me to hate muggles and muggleborns than they were half-bloods.”

He expects her to yell at him for that remark, but instead Granger is still just starring at him in a way that makes his shoulder itch. He very much wishes she would stop.

“May we cut in?” a hoarse voice asks, and this isn’t quite the rescue he’d been hoping for, but he’ll take what he can get.

“Of course, Lady Longbottom,” he smiles, bowing to her.

Augusta ignores him completely and takes Granger’s arm, leading her to the other side of the dance floor. Draco blinks after their retreating backs, and barely catches sight of Lord Brown looking after Augusta longingly, likely because the old Lord is certifiably insane. Augusta Longbottom terrifies him. He has no idea how Lord Brown continues to nurse his frankly baffling crush on the woman. Then again, if Augusta was truly adverse to his advances, Draco figures she would have let Lord Brown know in some sort of suitably horrifying and painful way.

“Sorry about that,” Draco pulls his gaze to Neville who grins sheepishly and shrugs. “Want to dance?”

“Might as well,” he sighs, and he’s sure Neville was forced to attend all the same formal dancing lessons he was, so he’ll actually be able to do more than a half dozen steps with the man.

He loses track of Granger after that, and he’d be worried about it except that every time he catches a glimpse of her she’s at Augusta’s side. The rest of the evening is a blur, like it always is. He discusses the progress of over dozen children in his house with various Lords and Ladies, which is new, but the business talks and subtle interrogation over the state of everyone’s treasuries and family trees is old news. It’s nearing the end of the night when Augusta deposits Granger back at his side without saying a word. Granger looks rather dazed, which he thinks is only fair.

“Ready to go?” he asks. He’s already talked to everyone he needed to, and also he’s afraid that if they linger any longer someone will make a pointed comment about his guest, and then Granger will set something on fire.

“You promised me a library if I didn’t embarrass you, and I didn’t. I want to see the library,” she says crossly, but she’s also swaying on her feet, so Draco figures there’s room for negotiation.

“If we can leave now, I will unleash you on the Malfoy family library _and_ I promise to take you back here and leave you in the library at some point.”

She narrows her eyes at him. If she insists on the library, he supposes he can find a comfortable table to sleep on top of. “Very well,” she says. “I accept your terms.”

“Thank merlin,” he sighs, and almost smiles when she laughs at him.

The Longbottoms have already left, and Draco quickly says goodbye to everyone else he cares about before he and Granger step through the stone arch and come out the other side, this time without any fire. Granger turns to look behind them, but Draco doesn’t bother. He knows what she’ll see. An empty monument, the same as the muggles do, with no indication of what lays behind them. “Fascinating,” she breathes.

He raises his hand and snaps his fingers. Nox and his carriage lands mere moments later, and he barely has the presence of mind to help Granger into the carriage before following her in and collapsing on the seat. On the surface, spending an evening dancing and talking shouldn’t drain him this much, but he always leaves these things feeling exhausted. “Well? What did you think?”

She turns her head from the window, and he takes a small moment to feel gratified that she’s decided the carriage is safe enough that she can look out the window without fear. “I think I have more questions than ever, but that was quite … informative. Thank you for taking me.”

She seems earnest, so Draco smiles at her like he means it, like she’s his friend. “You’re welcome, Granger.”

“Oh, you might as well call me Hermione,” she says. “Everyone else does.”

“In that case, I don’t suppose I can stop you from calling me Draco, can I?” he asks, and this is a much better outcome than he was expecting. Although, it was probably _exactly_ the outcome that Luna was hoping for, the meddlesome brat.

“No, I don’t suppose you can,” she says, satisfied.

They land on Hogwarts grounds, right in front of the castle. He’s just helped Hermione out of the carriage and Nox is already in the air back to the manor when he turns around and sees two people waiting for them on the palace steps.

Draco is instantly offended. “What, you didn’t think I would return her in one piece?”

“Don’t look at me,” Ron says, grinning. “This wasn’t my idea.” Draco glances at a glowering Harry Potter, then quickly looks away. Ron jumps down the steps and grabs his wife’s hand and twirls her around like a ballerina. “Look at you, done up all pretty. I’m jealous.”

Hermione looks to Harry then rolls her eyes. “As you should be,” she informs him, throwing herself at Draco so he has no choice but to wrap his arms around her or risk her falling to the ground, which he certainly isn’t going to allow while she’s wearing his mother’s dress. “I want a divorce. I’m in love with Draco, this one night has changed me forever. I’m sorry.”

“I understand,” Ron says easily, which at least makes one of them. “But consider this. We stay married, and instead we just share Draco?” He gives him an over exaggerated wink, and it’s physically painful for Draco not to roll his eyes at them. “I don’t normally go for blokes, but you’re so pretty that it doesn’t really count, does it?”

“It definitely counts,” he says dryly. “Will you take your wife? What are you even doing here?”

“I don’t know.” Ron turns and yells up the steps, “Hey, Harry, what are we doing here?”

Potter is giving them the kind of scowl that makes it clear that not only did he kill a dark lord, but he spent years after the war hunting down the darkest and most dangerous of wizards from the darkest and most dangerous parts of the world. Draco is almost alarmed. Potter doesn’t actually think he’d do anything to Hermione, does he? Ron doesn’t seem worried, and he’s her husband.

“You two,” Harry grounds out between clenched teeth, “are a couple of no good, back stabbing traitors.”

He stomps away after that in a melodramatic fashion reminiscent of their Hogwarts days. Is this about the argument they had? Since no one else seemed upset at him, he’d assumed Potter wasn’t that upset either, but he must have been wrong.

Draco starts to ask about it, but Ron only claps him on the shoulder and says, “Don’t worry about it. He’s just cross because we’re doing what we told him not to do.”

“Which is?” he asks, blinking.

Hermione and Ron share a look that oddly reminds him of his parents and all the silent conversations they used to have. “Don’t worry about it,” Hermione says, echoing her husband.

He stares, completely unimpressed and just as confused as before.

Gryffindors. Honestly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hope you liked it!
> 
> feel free to follow / harass me at: shanastoryteller.tumblr.com


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for the long time between chapters! i hoping to update at least monthly going forward

There are very few things Draco enjoys about his third year Gryffindor and Slytherin class. Although, to be fair, it takes place on Mondays at eight in the morning, so they’re already at a disadvantage.

What does bring him enjoyment is watching Raina glare young Albert Weasley into being a half decent Potions student. Before, he’d barely been scraping by with an Acceptable, but the last two potions he and Raina had turned in had earned them two Outstanding marks. They sit front and center, so Draco knows it’s not just that Raina’s doing all the work and then slapping Albert’s name on it. She makes him do half the work, but pushes his hand away whenever he’s about to do something wrong. Maybe if Raina had been around to help Neville back when they were in school, he would have fared better on his Owls.

“If your potion turns a pale blue color, then you’re doing fine,” he says, walking in between the rows of desks. “If it’s a darker blue, you can fix that by lowering the heat and stirring counterclockwise for about two minutes.”

“Er, Professor?” asks Parker. He’s the most powerful Slytherin in his year, which doesn’t do him much good in potions. “What if it’s white?”

Draco rushes to the back of the classroom. He manages to push Parker and his partner Sarah back from their desk, but doesn’t get there in time to stop the potion from exploding.

The runes along the edges of the desk flare golden. The potion doesn’t leave the confines of the desk, stopping and sliding down midair as if they’ve hit an invisible wall. The explosive components of the potion are channeled through the iron legs and into the castle’s stonework, as intended.

Unfortunately, none of that prevented the wall of flames from leaping up and burning his entire left arm and side. It’s incredibly irritating that any fire preventative spells he could apply interferes with the fire spells the students need to cast in order to heat up their cauldrons. He really needs to find a work around for that.

He grits his teeth against the pain. It’s hardly the worst he’s experienced, and he manages to put the fire out almost as soon as it appears. Because it was a magical fire, that still means he’s dealing with second degree burns, which is less than ideal. “Professor!” Sarah exclaims. “Are you okay? I mean, you’re not okay, I’ll go get Madame Pomfrey–”

“Sit down,” he says. Sarah’s eyes narrow, but instead of letting her argue, he just points at her seat. She’s still glaring at him as she sits down. Parker is as pale as a ghost. “Parker, you too.”

He drops into his seat like he’s made of stone, staring at Draco’s burned left side and his blistering skin. Honestly, Draco’s more upset about his robe than his skin. One of those will heal, and the other cost him a hundred galleons. “Why did your potion explode?”

“I’m sorry,” he blurts out, “I didn’t mean to hurt anyone!”

“That’s not what I asked. Why did your potion explode?” he repeats.

“I really think you should go to the hospital wing,” Sarah says.

His eyes narrow. “Are you deaf, or being purposely obtuse? Answer the question.”

He can see a couple people raising their hands in his peripheral vision, but he doesn’t call on them. He knows they know how not to explode their potions, because they didn’t do it. Parker and Sarah did. They need to answer his question.

“We used the wrong ingredient?” Sarah tries.

“Is that a statement, or a question?”

She glares at him, but turns to the board. She looks between their ingredients and those listed in the instructions, and frowns. “We did not use the wrong ingredient.”

“No,” Draco agrees, “you did not.”

He turns his eyes from Sarah to Parker, and waits. He swallows, then says, “Maybe, maybe we, uh, put them in the wrong order?”

“No,” Sarah says confidently, scanning both the board and her notes. “We didn’t. We put them in the cauldron in the right order.”

Parker stares into the distance, silently counting something off on his fingers. Draco sees the exact moment he figures it out, his face clearing. “The fire! It wasn’t hot enough!”

“Why would that make something explode?” Sarah asks, wrinkling her nose.

“Ashwinder scales explode if they’re not kept warm enough,” he says. “That’s why they’re the main ingredients in fireworks. And we had powdered ashwinder scales in the potion.”

“But the flesh eating slugs are supposed to stabilize them,” she argues. A moment later she twists to read the board, then scowls. “We didn’t mix the scales and slugs together before putting them in the potion like we were supposed to. Instead, we just added them at the same time. Which would have been fine, if our heat wasn’t too low. But it was. So, it exploded.”

They both turn to look at him, and he’d clap if he wasn’t in so much pain. “Very good. Five points each to Gryffindor and Slytherin for being able to analyze and deconstruct an unexpected result.” He turns and looks at the rest of his class. “If you go beyond basic potion making, you’ll learn that being able to figure out what you did after the fact to get the result you did is just as valuable as doing it correctly in the first place. Understand?”

All the kids nod.

Albert raises his hand. “Er, Professor Malfoy, should you maybe go the hospital wing now? Your arm looks kinda awful.”

Raina is glaring at him, which means Draco is definitely going to get a letter from Lady Lestrange. She’s going to make fun of him mercilessly, and it will come up at the next meeting of the Lords and Ladies.

“Everyone put a stasis charm on your potion, bottle it up, then vanish the rest,” he orders. “I’ll grade you based on what you’ve already done. You get out of class early because I have to go get yelled at by Pomfrey. Don’t get used to it.”

~

Few injuries or sicknesses are perilous enough to require more than a day or two spent in the infirmary. Pomfrey ruins all the fun of being sick, so as long as they’re not actively vomiting, kids tend to prefer to just get healed and go back to class. Not even wizards have been able to cure the common cold, but they can’t treat the symptoms to the point that most people forget that they’re sick. Up until the spells wear off, and then they crash and sleep for twelve hours. That had happened to Draco more than once while he was studying for his mastery.

Seeing as it’s Monday morning, Draco isn’t expecting anyone else to be in the infirmary when he steps inside.

“Draco,” Potter says, green eyes wide under his ridiculous glasses. “What happened to you?”

“What happened to _you_?” he retorts, walking towards Potter since he’s already seen him, meaning he’s lost his chance to run. He’s shirtless and sitting on one of the beds, something that Draco would probably find more distracting if it wasn’t for the large diagonal cut starting from his sternum and curling over his hip. It’s not deep, barely oozing blood, but Draco doesn’t understand how he got hurt in the first place. “Is there a dark wizard running around the grounds that you couldn’t resist the urge to capture? Or perhaps Hagrid has gotten a giant cat to accompany his giant dog. How many heads does this one have?”

Potter rolls his eyes so hard Draco’s surprised they don’t pop out of his head. “I teach an extra curricular dueling class in the mornings. One of the kids got lucky. It was a lot worse before Pomfrey got her hands on me.”

“Which kid?” he asks. “I may make them a plaque. ‘More Competent than Voldemort.’ In gold. Aren’t you supposed to be some sort of badass auror? How did a kid get the drop on you?”

If looks could kill, Draco would be dead on the floor. “I was showing them the wand movements and he cast it on accident. What was I supposed to do? Cast a knock back jinx on a student?”

“Protego exists, and unless this kid is the second coming of Merlin, it would have held,” Draco points out. “Seriously. Which kid?”

“Whenever I cast protego, the spells just bounce off. I didn’t want it hitting someone else!” He runs his hand through his hair, reopening the wound across his chest and causing it to start bleeding anew. He doesn’t seem to notice. “Oberon did it. Don’t bring it up, though, he feels awful.”

“Are you joking?” Oberon, the great grandson of the Ollivander lord, has the look of a Picasso painting and reminds Draco painfully of Neville when they were kids. “I’m going to owl his grandfather immediately, he’ll be so proud.” He’s not joking. Lord Ollivander might actually get the kid a plaque. “Also, your shield charms repel spells instead of absorbing them because you overpower them. Knock it off.”

“You sound like Kinglsey,” he grumbles. “It never works, no matter how little power I put into them. Even when I barely use any magic, everything bounces off anyway.”

Draco doesn’t roll his eyes, but it’s a near thing. “That’s because your definition of barely any magic and everyone else’s differs to laughable degree. But I suppose it’s only fair that you suffer some downsides from being more powerful than Dumbledore.”

“I’m not,” he insists, and Draco gets the impression that he says that a lot.

The last time they had a conversation that touched on tradition, it ended in a yelling match. So far, they’ve been managing to talk almost normally, and he’s strangely reluctant to ruin that. But not saying anything almost feels like cowardice, and he got his fill of cowardice during the war. “You are. You shouldn’t deny that. Dumbledore’s power and yours are different. He wasn’t born with all of his, he borrowed some of it, but you were, and you didn’t. All of your power is your own. It’s impressive, and rare, and you should be proud of what you are. Even if what you are is strange and different from everyone else.”

Potter has a strange look on his face that Draco can’t place, but at least he doesn’t seem angry. “So you’re saying I’m a freak, and I should be proud of it?”

The way he says freak makes the hair on the back his neck stand on end, and he can’t say why. He doesn’t like the turn this conversation has taken, but for an entirely different reason than he was expecting. “Well, you’re no more of a freak than the rest of us. You were given a gift.”

There’s more he could say if Potter knew about his heritage, about their traditions. He could say that it’s all borrowed in the end, and he should enjoy it since he has it. He could tell him that his ancestors paid in blood for his magic, that they would be pleased to know their sacrifice wasn’t in vain. He could say that he’s from an ancient and noble line and that comes with certain privileges and responsibilities, and magic is a tool to help him in both.

But he can’t.

Because Potter may be the most powerful person to walk the earth in a long time, but he doesn’t know where that power comes from, what it costs. What it’s cost those who came before him.

Terrible, but great. That’s how some people described Voldemort, but it was a stolen phrase, one that’s been around a long longer than the dark lord, longer than Hogwarts itself.

Terrible, but great, is how young children are taught to think of magic. Before they learn anything else, they learn that phrase.

They learn that nothing so beautiful comes without a price.

But Potter doesn’t know. All the other purebloods know, Ron knows, blood traitor or not. But Potter doesn’t. The Heir to the Potter line _doesn’t know_ , and Draco doesn’t know what to do about that. He doesn’t know if there is anything he _can_ do about that, at least not without it ending in a duel, one he’ll most certainly lose unless he gets lucky.

They’re just staring at one another, the silence stretching between them and become more awkward by the second, but Draco refuses to be the one to break it.

“All right, Harry, this should take care of the – MR. MALFOY!” Pomfrey screeches. He turns to see her coming out her office with a healing potion in her hand. Her eyes are narrowed in fury. “What on earth happened to you?”

“A couple of third years blew up a potion. I got in the way. I can heal it myself if you’re busy,” he adds. He’s decent at healing charms, and considering all her healing potions are ones that he brewed, he hardly needs her for that. But whenever he heals himself, he always ends up messing it up in some way, and he’s rather not to do that, obviously.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she snaps. She shoves the healing potion at Potter, “Drink this.” He obeys without question. She taps her wand against Draco’s back, and what’s left of his robe and shirt vanishes, leaving him in nothing more than his trousers. It’s a good thing he stuck his wand in trouser pocket on the way here. Harry chokes on his potion, and starts coughing, his face red as he pounds on his chest. “Really, Mr. Potter, I hardly think it tastes that bad.”

Pomfrey mutters a long string of Latin at his back, and there’s a cooling sensation all over his left side, causing him to instantly relax. “It’s supposed to taste like mint and strawberry,” he tells Potter, “It’s made to be drank by literal children.”

“It wasn’t the taste,” he says defensively, done coughing but still red. Draco would have thought his dark skin would help with that, but Harry’s face is nearly the same color as Ron’s hair, which can’t be healthy. “I just swallowed wrong.”

Honestly, it astounds him now that Potter survived the war since he can’t even swallow a potion properly. “All done!” Pomfrey announces. Draco looks down, and his skin is fully healed and back to being pale and unblemished. “Now, if the two of you could keep from getting hurt by your students, I so would appreciate it.”

She doesn’t wait for their answer, instead just turning around and walking back to her office.

“Am I supposed to walk back to my room like this?” Potter asks plaintively.

Draco considers his naked torso. “It’s been a while since you’ve graced the cover of Witch Weekly, hasn’t it?”

Potter is glaring at him, but it doesn’t have any bite to it. “That’s not funny.”

“I disagree,” he says, pulling out his wand. He summons a button up shirt from his wardrobe, pulling it over his shoulders and quickly doing up the front buttons. If Potter’s trying to hide his look of longing, he’s doing a terrible job of it. It’s Potter’s own fault for not being controlled enough in his magic to summon his own clothes. He runs a critical eye over him, and he’s fit, he know he looks good, but Potter has the type of muscles and width that come from spending four years hunting down dark wizards, and Draco’s not sure he has anything that will fit. He could try and transfigure something, and while he’s sure it would be serviceable, transfiguration is far from his best skill, and he doesn’t want to embarrass himself.

He summons a sweater from his closet that’s a couple sizes too large, and hopes that Harry won’t reject it on principal. “Here.” Potter looks at the green sweater in confusion. The little silver snakes patterned across it probably don’t help. “You wanted something to wear, didn’t you?” he asks impatiently. “It’s the only thing I have that’s might be your size. Unlike you, I wear clothes that fit.” Only after he says that does it occurs to him that he could have summoned a normal shirt and just cast engorgio on it.

“Then why do you have this?” Potter asks, taking the sweater like it might bite him.

Draco considers not answering him, or lying. For some reason, he still can’t get Potter’s expression when he’d called himself a freak out his head. “It’s nice to wear on chilly days if I’m not leaving the house.”

He braces himself for laughter or mockery, but instead Potter just smiles at him. “I used to steal Ron’s sweaters for that. He finally just told his mom to start making my Christmas sweaters a couple sizes too big.”

Draco has no idea how to respond to this piece of unsolicited personal information, so he just says, “Return it whenever,” and walks out of the hospital wing.

~

He’s picking up the halfblood baby from Lord Flint on Saturday morning, which means he can do the adoption ceremony sometime in the afternoon. Which only leaves the question of who’s going to raise the kid. His family tree is spread out on his desk, and they’re running short on living branches who haven’t intermarried with another pureblood. This kid is being given to the Malfoy family, so he wants them raised as a Malfoy, not a Malfoy who’s a Goyle or a Nott or a Brown by marriage.

Diane’s younger sister, Annabel, got married to a Rosier a couple years ago, an upstart auror who works long hours. Nora probably doesn’t have the time for a baby, but Annabel might, and he’s pretty sure she likes kids. She likes her sister’s, at any rate.

He calls her on the mirror he keeps on at his desk, and when she answers she’s in the middle of putting up her hair. Based on that and the angle, he assumes she’s speaking to him from her vanity. “My lord,” she greets cheerfully, carefully pinning her mass of hair in place. “What can I do for you?”

“We’re getting another baby,” he says. “I’m pretty sure if I try and give Randolph any more kids, he’ll revolt.” The old man loves kids, but he'ss currently raising three of them, and although Draco’s pretty sure he’ll continue happily taking them until his house is bursting at the seams, his wife can only handle so much before she snaps and tracks Draco down to strangle him.

Annabel’s whole face lights up, which is a good sign. “Yes! We’ll take him. Her. Them. Absolutely.” He hadn’t expected it to be that easy. He must look surprised, because she says, “We’ve actually been talking about it. I told Nora when she proposed that I wanted a lot of kids, but she doesn’t feel like it’s a good time because she’s not home often enough. But unless her career tanks, she’ll never be home often enough, so there’s no point in waiting as far as I’m concerned. I’ll check with her, but she already agreed in theory.”

“Why didn’t you talk to me?” he asks. “Just because I’m a professor doesn’t mean I’m slacking on my duties as the family head.” He hopes it doesn’t, at least. Have people been saying something?

She shrugs, “Honestly, Nora still wants to wait, but if there’s a baby in need of a family, then we’re not going to turn them away. Let me talk to my wife. I’ll call you tomorrow.” He nods, and she adds on, “No one thinks you’re shirking your duties. We know you’re busy. But we also know you’ll come if we need you.”

Oh, that’s good. He should really work on seeming less transparent. “Talk to Nora, and let me know.”

“You should consider taking one of the kids,” she says, “You don’t have an Heir, you know.”

He wrinkles his nose. His life is more than enough of a disaster without adding a child to it. That’s a later problem. “No thanks. Keep it up, and I’ll name Luna the Heir.”

“She’d be great at it, and Xeno would be furious, which is always a plus,” she says, then blows him a kiss. His mirror shimmers as she disappears from it. He marks down a couple more possibilities, and then taps the family tree with his wand, banishing it back to the manor.

He’s halfway through Dacia Zabini’s proposal for the potions club when Milly pops into existence next to him. “Professor Granger is being here for you.”

On one hand, he’s legitimately busy, but on the other, he doesn’t want Hermione to think he’s avoiding her, which can only end in her attempting to set him on fire. “Let her in.”

By the time he steps out his office, Hermione is sitting cross legged in one of his chairs by the fire, a thick scroll held in her hands. “I have some questions about the House,” she says, bushy hair pinned in a bun on top of her head.

“It’s only been two days, how do you have that many questions?” he asks, looking at her scroll in trepidation. She’s in his quarters, it’s too late to run, so he just sits on the edge of his couch closest to her. He snaps his fingers a couple of times, and by the time he’s done a steaming pot of tea and two cups are on the table.

She glares at it, but seems to decide to pick her battles, and says, “Actually, I wrote this the night we got back, but Ron said I shouldn’t ambush you the next morning. So, I gave you two days. Aren’t I nice?”

“Your kindness is appreciated,” he says dryly. He pours himself a cup of tea, then says, “Okay, go ahead.”

“Why all the secrecy?” she asks. “What’s the point of hiding everything?”

Now he’s just confused. “What secrecy? The House has been meeting once a month on the full moon for over a thousand years. Everyone knows. Besides, someone takes notes of what’s discussed at every meeting, as well as how much blood was spilled, and it’s stored in the library archives. In triplicate. It’s no more of a secret than the Wizengamot meetings.”

“I didn’t know it was happening,” Hermione points out, “Neither did Harry.”

“But Ron did, and Neville, and Luna, and a whole bunch of other people,” he says. “Muggle raised folk are the minority in the magical world. It’s not our fault you don’t know what’s going on. When Dumbledore proposed that Muggle Studies be altered to be about muggles in the early nineteen hundreds, most of the House was against it.”

“But you let it happen,” she says.

He rolls his eyes, “Contrary to popular belief, we don’t actually control everything that happens. We just try and know about it and influence it. That doesn’t mean we succeed.”

“So, what, for nearly a hundred years you let muggleborns remain ignorant? You let them be hunted down and prosecuted, for what, exactly? Because Dumbledore changed the curriculum, so you all threw your hats in and gave up?” she asks angrily.

He raises a hand. “Being against muggleborns is a new prejudice. That didn’t start until the fifties, at least on a large scale. Of course, people have always held prejudices, the Flints practically seem to collect them, but there’s a difference between a few people being assholes and a social movement. So, you’re right, we did nothing. We didn’t think a few people not being raised knowing about the world would break us. The House thought they would learn. That even if there wasn’t formal classes about it, that it would be impossible not to pick up. We were wrong,” he says firmly. “Maybe if Voldemort hadn’t come to power, then everything would have worked itself out, then it would have gone like the House thought it would. But he did, and it didn’t. Ignorance was bred on both sides, and anger, and Voldemort used that to make the war into something other than how it started, and our whole society suffered for it.”

“So it’s Voldemort’s fault?” she asks, lips pressed in a tight line.

He’d love to say yes. He’d love to lay all the blame at the madman’s feet, dust off his hand of the mess, and walk away. But he can’t. “No. Voldemort came to power because people let him. Ignorant people will always exist in one way or another, but people not knowing any better isn’t an excuse for a thirty year guerilla civil war. Everyone should have known, and someone should have stopped him.” This hurts to say, but he has to say it, it’s only fair. “If my father had been a Lord true to his oaths to protect magic, he wouldn’t have followed Voldemort. He should have known better. He should have tried to stop him. And maybe he would have died trying, but that was his duty as Lord. To die for our people, and for the magic. But he didn’t.”

“You’re talking as if the war started over something other than blood purity,” Hermione says, “but it wasn’t. All the history books say the same thing. Voldemort initially gained power championing blood purity and the exclusion of those who were not pure. How could anyone support that and not be awful?”

“Because the modern notion of blood purity and the historical one are different,” he answers. “Blood is magic, remember. Magic purity. What that war began as, what every war before it was about, was keeping the muggles away from us and away from our world. When Voldemort’s war began, it wasn’t about muggleborns, or torture, or any of that. It was about isolationism. The muggles were in the midst of their own terrible war, using weapons so powerful that even we feared them. People wanted to retreat, to hide, to go deeper and closer to one another where muggles couldn’t unknowingly hurt us with their war. More than a few wizards died from bombs dropped across London.”

“They were already so separate,” she says slowly, “it wouldn’t have been that much of a stretch to retreat even further apart.” She has an odd look on her face, and Draco can only assume it’s occurring to her that wizards have watched muggles face inhumane atrocities throughout history, and done … nothing. At least as a society.

He nods, “Most people were in favor of it. People didn’t see why they should have to die for a war they weren’t apart of and hadn’t started. But there were a few problems. We weren’t a totally separate nation. Halfbloods and muggleborns existed, and they had a connection to the muggle world, had families they wanted to protect, that they couldn’t abandon. But in refusing to either leave them behind or stay with them in the muggle world, they placed the rest of the wizarding world in danger. They wanted the wizards to get involved in the war, to help, to fight. Some purebloods agreed and were of the opinion that we stop hiding and help, while others were opposed, and said that if we had to brake the secrecy laws it should not be in the middle of a muggle war that threatened to wipe us out entirely.” He rubs the back of his neck, and glances into the fire because he doesn’t want to chance looking at her face. “That’s how the war started. Halfbloods have been looked down on due to their parents’ choices for a long time, but it wasn’t this violent, and muggleborns were considered pure, a gift of magic. That’s how it _began_. This is how it ended.”

“Well, how it ended is crap, and since you lot have so much power, you should do something about it,” Hermione says, fire in her eyes.

Draco can’t even say he’s surprised. This is the woman who champions the rights of house elves, for merlin’s sake. “What do you want done?”

Surprise flickers over her face, like she expected him to argue with her. “Reinstate the original muggle studies course, for one thing. Dumbledore’s been dead for eight years, and nothing’s changed. Your study group is helping, but only the kids in Slytherin, and it’s not enough.” She bites her bottom lip, “I still think wizarding kids learning about the muggle world is valuable, though. There’s so _much_ of it. There’s not needing something, and then there’s putting your head in the sand and ignore the other ninety nine percent of the world.”

He initially thought Hermione was going to attempt to murder him for holding the classes, and now she’s actively supporting them. His life is so strange. “Keep the muggle studies class as is. Do I think learning about muggles is inherently valuable? No.” She glares, but this can’t be new information to her. “But I don’t think Ancient Greek is inherently valuable ether, and it’s still an elective.”

“So we add a new class, a required one,” she says, “for the muggleborns. Or even muggle raised.”

“Potter is a rarity, but yes, I agree,” he says. “However, I feel the need to point out that introducing students to these concepts as first years is more useful to them than leaving them to flounder for two years and then forcing them to take it.”

“It’s also unfair that muggleborns gets one of their elective choices taken away,” Hermione admits. “I agree they need to know it. But we need to make it fair.”

Draco thinks the fair part is that they didn’t have to grow up memorizing family trees until their eyes felt like they were bleeding, but he knows Hermione isn’t going to buy that for a second. “Replace History of Magic. Or alter it, I guess. Instead of being about goblin wars that no one cares about, have it be about the actual history of magic, the house and our traditions, all of it.” She opens her mouth to argue, but Draco says, “Be honest, how useful was Professor Binn’s class?”

She sighs and admits, “Not very. Fine, say we alter the curriculum so History of Magic is about wizarding tradition and society. The purebloods and other kids who already know it won’t want to take it, nor should they have to. Now they’ll have a gap in their schedule.” She sits up straight with a gleam in his eyes he knows he’s going to grow to hate. “They should take Muggle Studies as a required class instead.”

“No,” he says immediately, “Absolutely not.”

“It’s perfect,” she insists. “All of your sort want the muggleborns educated about wizarding society, and all my sort want the wizards educated about muggle society. Those in the middle don’t care, and you’re right, absolutely no one is attached to History of Magic as is, except maybe Binns.”

The thing is, she’s right, but he hates it. And he’s considered to be a moderate as far as the house is concerned. “It will never pass.”

“It’s the only way it will pass,” she insists. “We’ll have it so taking one of the two classes is a requirement for the first two years. After that, they can _both_ be electives.” He’s scowling, but she only shrugs. “Look, intended or not, Voldemort’s war turned an ignorance about muggles, muggleborns, and halfbloods into a hatred that ended in thousands dead on both sides. Maybe you and I didn’t make this mess, but we have to fix it. This will fix it.”

“This will get the other Lords and Ladies out for my head,” he glares. Then, reluctantly, “Giving the kids three electives to choose from will be popular, at least. You’re not the only one who thought having only two was unfair. My mother just paid for a tutor over the summer, but not everyone has that.”

“Especially the muggleborns,” Hermione says. “They can’t do that, it’s not even an option, regardless of money. This will _work_ , Draco.”

He can already feel a headache building at the base of his skull. He regrets becoming friendly with Hermione Granger. “Fine. We’ll work on it. You work on a proposal for a revised Muggle Studies class, I’ll do one for a revised History of Magic, and we’ll turn them into something that both sides won’t spit back in our faces. If we can get an organized proposal together by the holidays, there’s a slim chance we can push it through in time for the changes to take effect next year.” Lord Flint is going try to poison him. Lord Brown will support it, at least.

“How long should it be?” she asks. “I’ve never introduced new legislation before.”

“About three feet to start, then we’ll go from there.” He eyes the scroll in her hand, “How many questions did all that answer?”

“Three,” she says. Draco’s face drops, but she gets to her feet. “We can shelve the rest for later, I have a proposal to work on.”

He stands to walk her to the door, but she waves him aside, and he drops back down. “How considerate of you.”

“I saw Harry this morning, by the way,” she says, doing a very poor attempt at seeming casual. “I liked the sweater he was wearing. It looked good on him.”

There are times when Hermione’s obviously a genius, and then there’s now, when he thinks she has to be insane. “That’s nice?”

It’s not until she’s out the door that he remembers that he lent Potter _his_ sweater this morning. It’s a good thing there’s no one around to see how his whole face turns an unbecoming shade of red.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hope you liked it!
> 
> you can follow/harass me at: shanastoryteller.tumblr.com
> 
> i post writing updates in my 'progress report' tag, if that's something you're interested in keeping track of :)


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me: oh i'll mention house elves a bit, but won't get into, and then we'll finally get into some romance!  
> also me: here's another chapter of people sitting around and talking about world building i guess
> 
> note: before anyone feels the need to jump down my throat for not explaining everything all at once, no, this isn't the last we'll see of house elves, and this isn't the final word on it.

Draco is pretty sure that Filius is full of crap. “Wand movements aren’t _necessary_ for summoning charms, they’re just strongly recommended.”

“They’re necessary if you’re to do it safely and well,” he answers. “Just because you’ve been playing with fire since your school years by vanishing your cousin’s shoes doesn’t mean that’s behavior we like to encourage.”

He spends his mornings studying Flitwick’s office, because his evenings are quickly becoming cramped. He has the muggleborn classes, and he can let Liam take the reins on that mostly, but he still has to make an appearance at least once a week. Then there’s Dacia’s potions club, which he doesn’t _want_ to approve and supervise, but he just knows that the alternative involves them brewing dangerous potions anyway, just without him to keep an eye on them. Plus all the prep and grading for his own classes, and keeping on top of account.

All of that, of course, pales in comparison to having Hermione barging into his rooms at least twice a week to yell at him about magic and politics, like he has anything to do with it besides being the product of it. He’d be more irritated, but apparently she’s doing the same to Neville and Luna, so he supposes he’s getting off light, all things considered.

Draco could really use a time turner, though. He’s getting to the point where he’s willing to straight up commit murder if meant getting twelve straight hours of sleep.

“The twist at the end just gives it a path to follow as it vanishes,” he argues. “If you don’t care where you’re vanishing something to, then it doesn’t matter at all. And if you do care, then just concentrate and don’t get distracted, it’s not that hard.”

“Just concentrate and don’t get distracted,” Filius repeats, amused. “Well, that covers nearly all magic, so not incorrect advice, I suppose.”

Filius is mocking him. Draco’s going to banish the stack of books he’s standing on right from beneath his feet, and then maybe he won’t be so mug. Draco’s not even going to use the wand movement to do it, either.

“Did you finish the essay I assigned?” Filius asks before he can put his plan into action.

“In all my spare time?” he drawls, but, well, he did. He taps his wand against the air, and a thick scroll falls into Filius’s hands.

He weighs it in his hands then break out in a smile. “Very good, Draco.”

When he starts smiling at receiving the same praise he gives his house elves, it’s probably a sign that his life is spiraling violently out of control, and he should do something about that.

He thinks he likes it, though. This whole professor thing isn’t turning out to be nearly as bad as he thought it’d be.

The kids are all right, as far as kids go, and his coworkers aren’t nearly terrible as he thought they’d be. Hermione is actually one of the more tolerable people he spends his time around.

If only he could get some _sleep_ , then he supposes he wouldn’t have too much to complain about, really.

~

His elves don’t even bother telling him that Hermione is here anymore. They just let her in and get out her way, because they’re smart elves.

“I have a question,” she says, pushing open the door to his office. He’d try a locking charm, but he’s pretty sure it wouldn’t work, and would just make her mad.

“I’m shocked. Stunned. This is unprecedented. I don’t know if I’ll ever quite recover,” he answers, not looking up from the fourth years’ potions quizzes. They did surprisingly well. Either he’s a better teacher than he thought, or they’re all a bunch of cheaters.

He’s going with the latter. But he didn’t catch any of them in the act, so he’s tempted to let it slide. Banding together to cheat on his assignments isn’t the inter-house unity he was looking for, but he’s not about to take it for granted either. Maybe if he makes the tests ridiculously hard on purpose they’ll keep doing it, and keep working with each other? Or they’ll just have a nervous breakdown in the middle of class.

Either is sure to be entertaining, so he doesn’t have much reason not to do it.

Hermione glares at him, hardly a new experience, but the way she glares at him is different than it used to be. She rarely looks genuine angry when she’s talking to him now, there’s always an edge of warmth to temper the exasperation, and he has no idea what to do with it. “You’re doing the adoption ceremony tomorrow, right?”

“Yes,” he answers. His cousin must have managed to get her wife on board, because Nora had been the one to call him back the next day to tell him that they’d take the child.

“And you’ve taken other halfblood children into your family before?”

“Yes,” he answers again. “And muggleborns, and pureblood children who’s families hadn’t made it through the war.”

She takes a seat across from his desk and pulls out her scroll. “Does anyone ever have a hard time adjusting? With being a Malfoy but being a halfblood?”

Well, that’s easy. “No. They might have trouble adjusting for different reasons, but there’s no doubt about their place as a Malfoy.” She taps the desk to get him to stop writing and looks at him dubiously. “You’re still thinking like a muggle. Stop that.”

“Oh, well, if you insist, I’ll just erase eleven years worth of memories while I lived as a muggle,” she says, rolling her eyes.

“That would be ideal,” he answers, then, before she can yell at him, he continues. “It’s a blood adoption. A magical adoption. A bit of the family magic will be transferred to the child. They’re a Malfoy from that point on, no matter what else happens after that, just as if they’d been born into it. They get a place on the family tapestry just like everyone else.”

“Family tapestry?” Hermione asks eagerly. “Can I see it?”

He sighs. He wants to say no almost just so she doesn’t have anything else to ask more questions about, but he doesn’t think that will work. “It doesn’t leave the manor.” He bites his bottom lip, considering, and maybe Hermione’s spending too much time with him, because she’s not arguing. She can see he’s thinking of something, and is giving him the space to do it.

She’s not a member of his family, so he can’t give her unrestricted access. He trusts her, which he hadn’t expected, but trust doesn’t have anything to do with it. It’s just … something he can’t do. Tradition, expectations, precedent, or some combination of all three.

But he can bend the rules a little.

“Dax,” he says, “a moment.” There’s crack so loud that Hermione jerk to cover her ears, but by then there’s not point. He should have warned her, but it hadn’t occurred to him that he’d need to.

Standing in front of him is a house elf, old and sturdy, _steady_ in a way most house elves aren’t. But most elves aren’t as old or as experienced. “Lord Malfoy,” he greets.

“This is Hermione Granger,” he says, and Dax inclines his head. Hermione does the same after a moment, stiff and uncertain. He also should have probably told her that Dax was part of the older crowd, although he doesn’t know if that would have meant anything to her. “I want her added to the wards. She’s allowed access to the sitting room, kitchens, and the library. Understand?”

“Of course, Lord Malfoy,” Dax says. If he’s surprised by this request, he doesn’t show it. He snaps his fingers, and a silver dagger appears along with a small smoky quartz bowl. “Miss Granger, if you don’t mind.”

He holds out the items to her, but she hesitates to take them. “Am I supposed to bleed into that?”

“Dax needs your blood to add you to the wards,” he answers.

“Just an ounce is fine, Miss,” he says, offering the dagger to her handle first.

She still doesn’t take it. “If I give you my blood, am I agreeing to fall under your lordship or house?”

He’s too impressed to be insulted. “Clever. But no. That’s a more formal affair. Besides, you can’t be sheltered, you’re the wife of a blood traitor, which means you’re a blood traitor too,” he points out, which isn’t a hundred percent accurate, but he doesn’t want to get into the nitty gritty details of it right now. He just wants to finish grading his papers. She gets a look on her face that he’s fast becoming familiar with, one that says she’s thinking of more questions than he can possibly answer. “Blood first.”

She rolls her eyes and finally takes the dagger. She makes a shallow cut along her upper arm and lets the warm red blood drip and splatter across the sides of the bowl. That’s how she stays for nearly a minute until Dax says, “That will do, Miss,” and snaps his fingers.

The wound on her upper arms closes and heals like it was never there. Dax nods at them both then disappears with a crack. “He didn’t call you Master,” Hermione says.

“Dax isn’t under contract,” he explains. “After a hundred years of service, we just assumed he wouldn’t try and scratch our faces off if we forgot to leave milk out.” She keeps staring at him, so he clarifies, “That was a joke. The elves harvest their own moon orchids these days, and Dax has been with the family since before contracts were standard affairs.”

She just _keeps_ staring at him, and he really does have to finish grading these quizzes, so he wishes she would hurry this all up. Instead, she asks, “What the hell are you talking about?”

He really doesn’t have time for this. “Ask your husband.” He doesn’t even know what she’s confused about this time. She knows all about the contracts, it’s what she keeps protesting whenever anyone brings them up around her. Keeps on insisting that flowers aren’t appropriate compensation for indentured servitude, or something. He doesn’t know, it’s not like he bothered to pay attention to her before she steamrolled herself into his social circle.

“I’m asking you,” she says.

Merlin’s beard. He likes Hermione, but he has grading to finish, and, as she pointed out, an adoption ceremony to officiate tomorrow. He’s on a tight schedule. “Expecto patronum!” A silvery lynx pours out of his wand. “Go get Luna. Tell her that Hermione has some questions and won’t leave me alone.” She twitches her whiskers, then goes bounding away and through the wall. “I have to get this done, but you can ask Luna. I don’t know why you’re so reluctant to ask your friends these questions.”

“I do ask them, but they worry too much about hurting my feelings, and I like making you do it,” she answers, then sits down across from him and takes half of his remaining quizzes. “Here, I’ll help you grade until she gets here.”

He eyes her suspiciously, but she was always right behind him in potions, and right above in everything else except charms, so he has no reason to doubt her. A few minutes later, Luna pushes open the door to his office, but she’s not alone. Neville is behind her, which means he was probably with her when she got the message and isn’t that _interesting._

“Hello, cousin,” she says cheerfully, sitting on the corner of his desk. Neville, a normal human being, takes the chair next to Hermione. “What questions?”

“Is Dax under contract?” he asks.

She snorts. Neville is appalled. “Careful where you say that! Remember what happened to my Great Great Uncle Simon?”

“May he rest in peace,” Draco says solemnly.

“Pieces,” Luna corrects. “That’s what he gets for trying to negotiate with his elf.”

Hermione, irritated, knocks her knuckles against the top of the table. “What are you guys talking about?”

“We had a family elf,” Neville explains, “she’d worked for us for a few generations, with no contract, and then my uncle tried to talk to her about getting her a bigger garden since she’d worked for us for so long. She tore him apart for the insult, and we haven’t seen her since. My grandmother was only a little girl when it happened, and she was heartbroken. She loved that elf.”

“No contract,” Hermione says. “How can an elf be attached to a family without a contract? I thought that was the whole point.”

“I mean, these days uncontracted elves are a bit of rarity,” Neville says. “But Dax has been serving the Malfoy family for what – three hundred years? Four hundred? A contract at this point would just be insulting. And insulting your house elves ends in death.”

Draco is back to grading, but he’s still keeping half an ear on the conversation around him. He’d tell them all to get lost and to let him suffer in peace, but it’s … kind of nice to have people around while he works.

Not long after, his door opens, and he looks up just in time to see Potter frozen in his entryway with his borrowed sweater clutched in front of his chest like a shield. “Er,” he says, looking at everyone with wide eyes. “I just, uh, I wanted to,” he holds out the sweater in Draco’s direction.

Potter is a disaster. Also very, very dangerous. Not because of the whole famous auror, dark lord killer thing, although that’s impressive and all. But because he’s standing there looking like an idiot, clearly embarrassed as he holds out the borrowed sweater, and Draco, for some inexplicable reason, feels _fond_ of him.

Dangerous.

He flicks his wand, and his sweater vanishes out of Potter’s hands and back to his rooms. “Thanks, Potter.”

“Uh, yes,” he says, green eyes wide behind his ridiculous glasses. He takes one cautious step back, but then Neville leans back in his chair, grabs his wrist, and drags him over to join their odd semi circle. Draco doesn’t think he deserves this. He was just trying to get some grading done, like a responsible professor.

Luna transfigures a paperweight into what a farsighted person might describe as a stool, and Neville pushes Potter into it as Hermione scoots her chair over to give him more room. Potter catches his eyes, looking uncertain and uncomfortable, and it’s not like Draco’s the one who dragged him into this, it’s not his problem. “What are you waiting for, an engraved invitation?” he asks sarcastically, and Potter relaxes, just like he knew he would. “Although, wouldn’t it be easier for you all to go somewhere else, maybe?”

They ignore him, like it’s not his office they’re in and his desk they’re crowded around. Whatever. Don’t they have some actual work to do? All of them except Neville are professors, and he’s an apprentice, so he should be up to his ears and work. Draco became a Lord and begin his potions mastery at the same time, and that was one really terrible year. Not quite as bad as Voldemort living in his house and torturing him and his family on a regular basis, but pretty up there. They can sit around him and talk about whatever they want, _he_ has actual work to do.

He just drowns out what they’re saying, and has gotten mostly through the quizzes and is just considering if he has the energy to tackle the sixth year essays when Luna says, “They’re _brownies_ , Hermione, not children.”

He really hopes he’s missed some part of the conversation, or else he’s going to have to stop directing Hermione to Luna for questions. “What did you say? Don’t tell her we eat them!” That certainly won’t help her deluded campaign.

“The muggle myth,” Luna says, reaching over to flick him in the forehead. It barely even stings, but he’s still offended. “Brownies. Little folk who enter the homes of muggles and clean at night, can become invisible, and who expect milk or cream left out for them for their efforts.”

Oh, right, he forgot the muggles used to know about them. Back when things were less - divided. They used to know about a lot of things.

“Those were house elves?” she asks. “Or were they just like them?”

“No, they were house elves,” Neville says. “You can probably find some that are still around from then, who might have served a mixed house.”

“Mixed?” Hermione asks, and he doesn’t miss the way her eyes dart over Harry.

Luna doesn’t either. “Not mixed like me, or like Harry. Mixed as in muggle and magical people in the same house. House elves only appear from magical homes, but one or two witches or wizards was enough to qualify back then.”

“Wish it hadn’t been,” he grumbles, “If we hadn’t had as many house elves then, maybe I wouldn’t have so many _now_.”

Neville laughs at him, but joke’s on him. His family has almost as many house elves he does, Augusta just spreads them out more. One day it’s going to be Neville’s problem to manage all of that, and then it will be Draco’s turn to laugh.

“But they’re not slaves in the myths!” Hermione protests. “Or as good as. I don’t see how an eternal bond is worth some flowers.”

“And they don’t get milk like they did in the myths either,” Luna points out. “It was always the moon orchids. We just used to harvest them for the elves. We stopped because a couple finally got around to saying we were awful at it and doing it all wrong, so we just grow them and let them to what they want with them. Also, the bond isn’t forever, just as long as we keep providing moon orchids. If we stop providing orchids, then they’re free to kill us. Isn’t that nice?”

Harry scrunches his face up, and Draco thinks _adorable_ before he reign his thoughts back. “I don’t get it. Why do elves care so much about some flowers?”

“They eat them,” Hermione says. “They can survive on a variety of magical plants, or latant magic if there’s enough of it, but there usually isn’t. Moon orchid is their favorite, but it’s difficult and expensive to grow. It’s usually only found on the grounds of wizard’s homes and in the forbidden forest.”

“They _can_ grow other places,” Neville objects. “But the elves won’t eat them. At that point, they’re just pretty flowers. Besides, the whole reason we have this house elf problem is because the magic’s dying to begin with. Before, it didn’t matter. Moon orchids could be grown from almost any flower seed as long as it was planted in soil that had been mixed in a witch or wizard’s blood.”

“Why would someone do that?” Harry asks, appalled. Hermione’s too invested in the answer to be grossed out. Typical.

Luna shrugs. “House elves would just show up and start working. Once an elf decided it was cleaning your home, you had two options. You could either start growing moon orchids as a way to graciously return their kind favor, or you could slowly let your sparkling home spiral into chaos as the house elf got more and more upset that you weren’t feeding it and didn’t want it’s obviously superior help cleaning your home. Sometimes angry elves would just cause mischief, sometimes they would break things or hurt people. Sometimes people died.”

“Which wasn’t a big deal to the house elf, because there were far more wizards than there were elves, and they’d eventually find someone who was down for cleaning in return for some flowers,” Neville continues. “But then the witch trials happened. Or, well, got worse, because they’d pretty much always been happening. And the magic shrank, for lack of a better term, and average wizards and witches couldn’t make their own moon orchids anymore. So the elves went to those who still could. Which was those with ancestral homes. Now, we’re stuck on too many elves, not enough wizards, which is how we got to contracts. The elves do as they’re told and don’t destroy our homes or kill us, and we continue to provide moon orchids.”

“I have a whole acre dedicated to the damn things,” Draco says. “Since the manor is the ancestral ground for my family, all the elves go to the Malfoy grounds to collect theirs.”

“What was going on with Dobby, then?” Hermione asks suspiciously. “He wanted to be free.”

Draco snorts. “He didn’t want to be under _contract_ , which my family wasn’t going to do. Notice the first thing he did was come work for Hogwarts, where he could have his fill of moon orchids.” He hesitates, but so far being honest with Hermione hasn’t backfired on him, so he says, “Dobby was the strangest house elf I’ve ever seen, and no one was upset to see him gone. He routinely caused twice as many problems as he solved. But my father’s method of trying to beat the disobedience out of him was ineffective, and cruel. He didn’t want to free him because he was trying to prevent Dobby from turning into a boggart, but that’s not an excuse.”

Neville is looking at him strangely, and Luna is grinning so wide her face looks like it’s going to break in half. They should both stop that right now.

“From turning into a _what?_ ” Hermione demands, and merlin, is there never any end to her questions?’

“Unattached, morose house elves turn into boggarts given enough time,” Harry says impatiently. “I’ve seen it happen. But, not that is isn’t fascinating and all, but can we go back a bit? Wizards and muggles lived together?” he asks, incredulous. “But we’re so separate now! Why did we stop?”

Everyone goes quiet, and Draco knows Harry’s an idiot, but he can’t be this stupid. The reason’s a little hard to miss, even for a dunderhead. “The witch trials,” Hermione says. “All the books say it. After the witch trials, everything changed.”

“Not,” Luna clears her throat, “not exactly.”

“Things have never been easy, historically speaking,” Neville says. “Instances, of course, have been positive. Pockets of peace.”

“Which always gives morons false hope that we’ll have it again,” Draco says acidly. “That it’s sustainable and practical and won’t end up with more dead wizards and more magic lost.”

“We might. Just because it’s never been done doesn’t mean it can’t be done,” Hermione argues.

“Well, keep me and mine out of it. If you want to kill what’s left of our society forever, you won’t be using my people to do it,” he answers, glaring.

She’s not actually trying to start a fight with him, so she just sighs and rolls her eyes. “We keep having our own wars and killing ourselves every few decades, I’m not sure why you think there’s that much of difference. Not that I think it would necessarily all fall into war, mind you.”

“That’s different,” Luna says before he can. “When we kill each other, the magic stays. When they kill us, it’s gone forever.”

He doesn’t even have to look at them to know Hermione and Harry have no idea what they’re talking about. “Borrowed, not given. Earned, not taken,” he says, echoing what Liam said at the first Muggleborn class. “It’s not who kills who that matters. It’s what’s done with the bodies.” He swallows, looks at Harry, and says, “If nothing else, never forgive Dumbledore for what he did with your parents’ bodies. Leaving them to rot in a muggle cemetery was despicable. They were Lord and Lady Potter, and should have been treated accordingly.”

Harry doesn’t seem mad at him, which is nice, but Draco doesn’t think he really understands him either.

“That’s how you give it back,” Hermione says, eyes alight. “Isn’t it? Bodies.”

“Not pretty, and not free,” he answers. He wants to hit himself. He’d known she hadn’t known the specifics, but he’d assumed she’d known the basics, because _everyone_ knew the basics, but clearly they didn’t and he really needed to stop assuming they did. “Wizards don’t have graveyards. We just have ancestral homes.”

“From the earth we came, and into the earth we go,” Luna quips. “We have graveyards _now_ , but it’s still on ancestral earth, so it amounts to about the same. It’s just that it doesn’t stay within one family anymore.”

Neville shrugs, “Which isn’t so bad, really. Less Lords and Ladies, which isn’t ideal, but still magic, still wizards and witches, so it’s different, but it’s there.”

“But not those killed in the witch trials,” Draco says. “Burned or drowned, most of the time. Hanging, which gave us a chance, because sometimes those bodies were buried. But that meant opening up a fresh grave and stealing the body, all without being caught. And it’s not like we knew who exactly was a witch or wizard, and who was just an unlucky muggle caught in the crossfire, so it’s very possible that even if someone managed to steal the body and rebury it in time, it might not even be a witch or wizard, just a muggle who’s not going to do any good besides fertilizer. Tracking charms weren’t as good back then.”

Neville adds, “Some people say that anyone with magic could just escape, but that’s just not true. Back then, we were split up, and those that lived among muggles were the only magical person, or one of a half dozen or so in the village. Cities were safer, but not by much. So a witch could only escape if they had their wand, and no one was looking, and they had a place to go. Which meant many of them never escaped at all. They just died.”

Potter seems horrified, but Hermione is fascinated. “Explain that all again, but slower, and more.”

“We weren’t born,” Neville says with patience than Draco has. “Witches and wizards were made. Some ancestors long ago struck a deal with some forgotten gods, or gathered magic for willow trees, or the sun cracked open and we swallowed what came out. The details are all different, but the core of it is the same.”

“We were muggles once,” Luna says. “The magic we have is borrowed. It doesn’t belong to us, and we won’t be getting any more of it. So once it’s gone, it’s gone forever.”

Or so they say. It’s a at the intersection of myth and religion, and Draco doesn’t know which it is, and he doesn’t care. He just knows the numbers add up, so how exactly they got here doesn’t matter much. It just matters that they’re here, and that the rules they’re living by seem to work.

“Where do you think all those empty seats in the House came from?” Draco asks. “There are ancestral lands all across the world. Legends say they’re the places where the sun’s touch first fell, or where the first magic users were buried. It doesn’t matter why. We each contain magic and the ability to control it. When we die, that magic has to go somewhere. If we’re buried in the right land, we get to keep it. Another magical child will be born, and magic will live on. But if not, if our bodies are not put back in the earth in the right way, before a certain time, the magic is just - gone. Forever.”

“How do you know if it’s before that certain time?” Hermione asks, eyes wide.

Luna says, “Tracking spells work on corpses for about the first week after death, because the magic is still there. Once it’s gone, then there’s no point. It’s just a body. We’ll bury it, and we’ll mourn, but the magic won’t come back.”

“Unless it’s a battlefield,” Neville says grimly. “Ancestral lands can be made, with enough blood. Maybe they were all made, and we’ve just forgotten.”

Draco snorts. “With enough blood, you can make anything.” He gestures to the floor, “Hogwarts was built on the ancestral lands of Helga Hufflepuff and Godric Gryffindor. Their land bordered each other, so when it came time to make Hogwarts, the stuck it slap dab in the middle of their property line. The Gryffindor common room is on the side that used to be Hufflepuff’s land, and the Hufflepuff common room is on the Gryffindor side.”

“Diagon Alley is ancestral land,” Neville says, “all the graveyards, and most of the pureblood families have some too. It’s their ancestral homes. With some runes, dedication, and, well, enough blood, it’s possible to keep it in the family, so to speak.” He turns to Draco, “When your family came over from France, how many feet down did you bring over?”

“Twenty feet down, across about ten acres,” he answers. “Refilling the place we’d left in France with muggle earth apparently took weeks.”

Hermione frowns, then asks, “Do moon orchids only grow from ancestral lands?”

She really is the cleverest of them all. It’d be irritating if he could stop being so impressed.

“Do moon orchids only grow from earth that contains wizard’s bodies and who knows how much blood?” Draco asks. “Yes.” Neville makes a face, because there are a few ways to make them away from ancestral lands, but none of them are worth the trouble.

“So right below us, and below all the old homes, and even Diagon Alley,” Potter says slowly, “are … bodies?”

“No coffins, no preservation, just a death shroud,” Luna says. “Hundreds of thousands of them. Because magic isn’t free.”

“So, what, if people aren’t buried in the proper place, we just lose magic?” he asks. “That seems … How do we know that’s how it works?”

Draco wants to be irritated with him, but can’t quite bring himself to do it. Like he said, dangerous. Potter is dangerous. “The empty seats at the House. The lower birth rates. The dozens of empty classrooms in Hogwarts alone. There used to be more of us. And we can’t just all agree to have a lot of kids for a few generations and call it a day. The magic is gone. At a certain point, we’ll just end up as squibs.”

Luna twists her body over his desk to elbow him in the side. “It’s not quite that dire. Yet. We’d have to continue on for about a thousand more years just as we are to die out completely.”

“But if we do continue on, just as we are, then we will die out?” Hermione asks. “That can’t be right. Magic is - there’s so much of it. We can’t just lose it.”

“We’re running out, and we’re running low. There’s only one source of new magic we have, and this past war nearly destroyed it,” Draco says.

Hermione gets up from her chair to glare down at him. She can only get the height advantage while he’s sitting. “Well, what is it then?”

He tilts his head back and looks up to meet her angry brown eyes. “You.”

Her mouth falls open. It’s clearly not what she was expecting. She has to swallow before she can say, “What?”

“You,” he says again. “Muggleborns are the only new source of magic we’ve been able to find. Your magic doesn’t feel like anyone else’s. It’s _new_. People have tried everything - inadvisable congress with magical creatures, dark rituals, the worst sort of potions made out of the remains of - well, you get the idea. For hundreds, probably thousands, of years, people have been trying to find a new source of magic, because it’s been steadily declining for that long. But we’ve only found one. Muggleborns.”

“Not like us,” Luna says, smiling, “The first of us were made. Supposedly. You were born. You’re special.”

“A gift from magic,” Neville adds. “That’s how muggleborns used to be thought of. It’s how they should still be thought of, or at least their new magic should be acknowledged, considering how desperately in need we are of it.”

“But then there was this war. And the hundred before it, and the witch hunts, which may have gone under different names all across the world, but they still _happened_ all across the world. So we kill each other, the muggles kill us, and we kill the only ones who can save us,” Draco says. “All this killing, and sooner or later, we won’t be able to do it anymore. We’ll just be dead.”

There’s a long, somber silence.

Why can’t they ever have normal conversations, about their students or quidditch or even the weather? He really needs to hang out with Pansy and Blaise. These people are just depressing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> at some point this universe's world and rules will be explained and i'll stop getting side tracked. i originally wanted this to be a fun professor darry fic with a little bit of world building. and now we're here. 
> 
> feel free to follow / harass me at: shanastoryteller.tumblr.com
> 
> i post writing updates in my 'progress report' tag if that's something you're interested in keep track of :)


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is the chapter i'd had outlined and meant to write before getting sidetracked by house elf lore

Dacia Zabini is going to make a fantastic potions master one day. But only if she manages to get through Hogwarts without blowing herself up.

“No!” he cries, swishing his wand to prevent her from dropping the powdered unicorn horn into her cauldron. “Why would you do that?”

“I want to see what would happen,” Dacia answers, unrepentant.

Raina looks more intrigued than horrified, which isn’t exactly comforting. Albert makes up for it though. He takes three steps away and is about thirty seconds away from ducking underneath a desk. Which isn’t really necessary, but it’s nice to see someone showing some decent judgement. No one else in Dacia’s ridiculous club does.

Draco thought that opening up the potions club to everyone would be a simple way to help facilitate the interhouse unity that Minerva is always harping on about. One the bright side, he was right, but on the less bright side, it turns on that the potions club is a wildly popular idea. Dacia is far from the only one interested in potions, and apparently the lack of competent professors over the last couple of years means anyone with even the slightest bit of interest is desperate for more instruction than they get in the classrooms. There are three students to every desk, meaning his classroom is about as full as it can be while potions are being made without it becoming a safety hazard.

Although, he’s pretty sure Albert is just here as part of Raina’s crusade to turn the boy into a half decent potions maker. There are at least three Gryffindors that Draco thinks are only here to make sure Raina doesn’t poison him, which seems like a wasted effort. If a Lestrange wanted to kill someone, they wouldn’t do something as subtle as poisoning.

“What would happen is that everyone would die,” he says to Dacia, and breaks the spell that’s holding her arm frozen. She puts down the unicorn horn, but she doesn’t look happy about it. “You’re trying to make a healing salve. Why did you think that would work?”

“I didn’t,” she says, “I just figured it might do something interesting. I couldn’t find any reference to someone doing it before, and I thought it might be cool.”

“There is reference to it, just not in the healing books, because it doesn’t heal anything. It is a fantastic base for a bomb, however, if that’s what you’re trying to do. Dungbombs contain _trace_ amounts. Not a whole tablespoon, mind you.” He looks pointedly at the large dollop of powdered unicorn horn that’s still holding.

Mariana raises her hand. He loves Mariana. She’s just quietly making illegal moonshine in the corner like a reasonable student, and not trying to kill them all. “In her defense, if she’d wrapped it in a bit of acromantular silk first, it would have made a really nice protective shield. Which is the opposite of an explosion.”

Dacia is ignoring all of them. “Healing bomb,” she breathes, then looks up to Draco. “Can I make one of those?”

He has no idea how that would – okay, he has a couple of ideas, maybe, but they’re going to have to get Neville or Sprout involved. “Make a healing salve without killing anyone first, and we can talk about it.”

Why does she look so put about that? She’s going to give him nightmares.

Cory, a fifth year Gryffindor and one of the few people in his year who isn’t buckling under the pressure of the impending Owls, waves him over. “Hey, professor! I was trying to make a face cream, but it seems like it might be poisonous? A little? But, also very moisturizing, so there’s that.”

Just a place to practice, Dacia said. They would only need a little supervision. He could get some grading done while they worked.

What a load of shit. Every time he takes his eyes off them for two seconds, they’re either almost killing themselves or others.

~

Draco hates to do this, because it’s just not very fair, but it’s not like he was ever interested in playing fair anyway.

“You’re my best friends, aren’t you?” he says to his mirror, where Blaise is taking up one side, and Pansy the other. “You have my back when I need it, even when it’s unpleasant, because you care about me and you know I’d do the same for you?”

Blaise is glaring at him. “I hate when you do this.”

“It’s not even going to be something fun, is it?” Pany asks. “Want us to kill some people? Take over a small county? Run away together to a tropical island and watch as society collapse in on itself while we drink alcoholic beverages with little umbrellas in them?”

The specificity of that last bit is a little concerning, to be honest. Pansy seems to enjoy helping Paige run the family affairs, but it might just be a front. Pansy’s good at those. Maybe they should take a vacation somewhere? “I need help grading.”

“Oh, fine,” Blaise says. “Do you have a key or a rubric or something? You know I’m crap at potions.”

How could he forget? He corrected almost all of Blaise’s potions homework for seven years. Or just did it, when they didn’t have the time for Blaise to be wrong first. “Yes, I have a rubric.”

Pansy wrinkles her nose, “I guess. Why can’t you ever ask us to do anything interesting? First snubbing us both to take Granger to the meeting, now this? These are grave insults, Draco.”

“Don’t try that with me, you both hate going to the meetings,” he says. “It wasn’t planned, it just happened, and she didn’t even curse anyone over it.”

“The Flints were pissed,” Blaise points out.

He rolls his eyes, “When aren’t they pissed? They’re so grumbly and unpleasant.”

“That’s because whoever isn’t a raging dick gets disowned,” Pansy says wryly. “Are we coming over now? Or do I have time finish typing out my will and testament before I die of boredom?”

“I’m coming through the floo in your quarters,” Blaise says, then vanishes in the next moment, his side of the mirror blurring with his absence before it settles.

It’s just Pansy taking up the other half of his mirror, and he doesn’t want to say something presumptuous or untrue and make her mad, but he still feels like he should say something, otherwise he’s just a crap friend. He’s only gotten as far as opening his mouth when she says, “Sorry, I don’t mean to be a bitch.”

“You’re not a bitch,” he says, “or, well, you’re not being one right now. Generally, it’s pretty up in the air.”

She rolls her eyes, but she’s smiling too, so he counts it a win. “I know that it’s important work and someone needs to do it. I just don’t know if I want that someone to be me.”

“Neither William not Paige will make you help if you don’t want to,” he points out. “If you want to do something else, they won’t be mad.”

“The problem is I don’t what know what the something else I would do is,” she says. “I just know I don’t think I want to do this, or politics, or go back to school, or – well, anything.”

Draco wishes he could say something helpful or inspiring, but he just can’t relate. He’s known what his role in life would be since he was a toddler, and he knew exactly what he would have to do once he got there. It hasn’t exactly been smooth sailing, what with the war and all, but he still loves his position and his family and loves being Lord Malfoy, even when it exhausts and frustrates him.

He’s always known what he was going to be. He hopes Pansy is talking to someone that isn’t him or Blaise, because they’re both useless at stuff like this. Blaise is just comfortably living off the small fortune his mother has accumulated from her seven dead husbands, which she may have killed herself, but hey, that’s neither here nor there. He hadn’t felt the need to get any sort of gainful employment, and doesn’t have to. Pansy doesn’t need to either, really, her Lord and Heir would let her coast by on being a professional socialite. It’s good for a prominent family to have a couple of those anyway, so it wouldn’t even be a hardship.

“Worst case scenario, you can always marry for me for profit and take over my house?” he offers.

“If you think I’m touching the responsibilities that come with being your wife with a ten foot pole, you’ve got another thing coming,” she says dryly. “Don’t worry about me, I’ll figure something out, and until then I’ll help out Paige. I’m coming through the floo to help you grade your awful papers.” The mirror shimmers, then Pansy is gone.

He walks out into his living room to see Blaise already seated with a stack of papers in front of them. “Did you talk to Pansy?” he asks without looking up.

Now he just feels like a dick. “Has she been feeling like this for a while?”

“Just on and off for the past decade,” Blaise says dryly. Oh. Well, he sucks. “Don’t worry about her, she’ll figure something out. Pansy can have whatever she wants, and she knows it. She just has to figure out what that something is.”

“I guess,” he says, but he loses the chance to talk about it further when Pansy steps thought his fireplace.

She’s wearing a shimmering, tight dress with a faintly sparkling white robe that just barely makes the whole thing decent, and he’d only been able to see her form the shoulders up while she was in her mirror. “Where you going out? I didn’t mean to ruin your night, you can leave me and Blaise to suffer.”

“Shut up,” she answers, sitting on the other end of the couch and snapping her fingers. A cup of tea appears in front of her, then disappears a moment later to be replaced with an ornate crystal glass and a bottle of firewhiskey. Milly’s doing, Draco assumes. She likes Pansy.

He does need the help, so he shuts up, sits in between his two best friends, and gets to work.

~

Draco watches his first years file out of the room and drop their potions at his desk as they go. At some point the Hufflepuffs decided they liked him, because he didn’t eat them, or something. He doesn’t know. But the Hufflepuff and Slytherin first years are one of the highlights of his week, not only because it contains his cousins, but watching Andrea wrangle two houses into listening her while looking like she’s doing nothing at all is scarily impressive. He hopes she does end up marrying Oberon, because she’d make a fantastic Lady. Or, at the very least, she goes on to work in the ministry.

Markel and Marilyn are the last in line, but they don’t move on from his desk. “Are you coming to lunch today?” Marilyn asks suspiciously.

“We’ve missed seeing you there,” Markel adds, elbowing Marilyn in the side.

He’s been taking a few meals a week in his rooms so he can use the extra hours to read up on the reports the goblins and supervisors send him, because unless he can get his hands on a time turner, he only has so many hours in the day. He was planning to do the same today, actually, but Markel is pulling some seriously impressive puppy dog eyes. It’s no wonder he keeps getting away with flying his broom into the rose bushes.

“I’ll put in an appearance,” he says. “Now shoo. I have to put the samples away.”

Marilyn looks like she wants to argue, but Markel says, “Okay!” and cheerfully drags her away.

They’re both such a pain. He kind of likes them, though.

He lied, just a little. The first year potions are simple enough that he can grade them just based on color, and they’re all already out, so he might as well just do it now. It shouldn’t take that long, almost everyone got a perfect score.

He’s about halfway through marking down everyone’s scores when there’s a knock. He’s in his classroom, and the door is open, there’s no need to knock. He looks up, and there’s Potter hovering in his doorway, and oh, okay, it was actually nice of him to knock, all things considered. “Hey Draco,” he says. “Do you have a second? Can we talk?”

“How ominous. Let me guess. You’re breaking up with me?” he asks, leaning back in his chair. “It’s so sudden, so unexpected, and I’m just not prepared. I thought we had something special.”

Potter rolls his eyes, but seems to take that as permission and comes inside. Even though his classroom is full of perfectly good chairs, he sits on the edge of Draco’s desk. What has he ever done to deserve this? That whole Voldemort business clearly wasn’t it. Talking back to his mother as a kid, probably. “I’m afraid it’s not that simple. You see,” he pauses for dramatic effect, “I’m pregnant.”

Draco laughs out loud, at least half because he wasn’t expecting it. When did Potter get a sense of humor? “Well, fuck, guess we’ll have to get married. My mother will be appalled. How do you look in white?”

“I look great in white,” Potter says, grinning, and Draco bet he would too, all that dark tan skin against white silk and those ridiculous green eyes under his stupid glasses. Potter would probably look fantastic in white, and he needs to stop thinking about this, right now, immediately.

“Did you come here for something in particular, or just to tell me about our future spawn?” he asks.

Potter hesitates, never a good sign, then says, “Don’t get mad.”

Oh, he doesn’t like the sound of this at all. “Okay.”

“I mean it,” he insists. “Just – let me finish before you get mad.”

That’s a more reasonable request, and one he can stick to. Hopefully. Maybe. Best not to make any promises, actually. “Sure.”

Potter is looking at him suspiciously, which is only fair. “Alright. So. About the supplementary defense classes that Luna and Neville are leading.” Draco tenses, but doesn’t say anything. “It’s just not tenable to keep doing this. Luna has her own classes, and Neville has his apprenticeship, although to be fair he’s handling that pretty easily, which I don’t understand. I wanted to die every day of auror training, but he’s getting plenty of sleep and Spout is thrilled with his progress, I just don’t understand, I’d say it’s magic, but _I_ have magic, and it didn’t do me any good. Anyway. I gave them the syllabus for all seven years so that’s not really an issue–”

“You did?” Draco asks, surprised. Potter didn’t say he couldn’t interrupt, he just said that he couldn’t get mad. He’s not mad.

“Of course,” he says, blinking. “They’re my students, I want them to succeed. But they’re _my_ students, and I should be the one teaching them. This is a stopgap measure at best. It’s working, you were right, their test scores are improving and their spellwork is better, and according to Neville they’re actually even better when I’m not watching them. But this is absurd, and there has to be a better solution. My students shouldn’t be afraid of me!”

He nearly shouts that last bit, chest heaving and cheeks flushed pink. He doesn’t look like a dunderheaded Gryffindork right now, or like the famous former auror. He looks like – Draco doesn’t know. But he likes it.

“They’re not afraid of you,” he says. He’s smiling, and he doesn’t want to be, but he can’t quite make himself stop either. “They don’t know you. You’re not scary. They just know rumors. They think you loved hunting down evil wizards, and that you think all Slytherins are evil wizards, and that all the evidence they’ve seen to the contrary is just faked sincerity. Don’t be too broken up about it. It’s not about you. It’s about their perception of you.”

“But I don’t!” he says, sliding off of Draco’s desk so he can pace in front of it. “I never have – I just wanted Voldemort gone! I wanted people to be safe! I wanted – I wanted _them_ to be safe too, so they wouldn’t have to make the same choices that we did. I know not all Slytherins are evil! Pettigrew was a Death Eater, and he was a Gryffindor–”

“I know,” he says, and Potter stops in his tracks, looking over at him with those piercing green eyes. “I was there, remember? I know what you’re like, and what you wanted. I’m not afraid of you. I know what you are.”

Potter’s not even blinking as he stares at him, and Draco should probably find that unnerving, but can’t quite bring himself to be bothered by it. “What’s that then? What am I?”

“An annoyingly powerful wizard who means well, but is, ultimately, a moron,” he answers, but he’s still smiling, and none of it is actually comes out sounding like an insult, which is good, because he doesn’t mean it as one. “Anyone who knows you also knows that you’d save the whole world if you could, regardless of its contents.”

Potter has never wanted for kindness. Some situational awareness and a couple brain cells to rub together, maybe, but that’s been true since they were kids.

“Oh,” he says, like that’s not what he was expecting. Draco doesn’t know why, he’s an asshole, not blind, and Potter wears his heart on his sleeves. It’s not exactly hard to figure him out. He’d wondered once if Potter had changed, if maybe he’d become something different than the stubborn, loyal boy Draco had known in school. But he hasn’t. He’s just the same. “Well, how do we get the kids to think that way, then? Or at least have it so that they don’t think I’m walking around ready to throw around unforgivables at the drop of a hat.”

“I’ll talk to them,” he says, and he’s already dreading that conversation. He knows some of them are going to have an awful lot to say about – well, a lot of things he’s been doing lately. Better to address it now before it boils over. And, hey, better to address it first with the kids so he’s got some practice when people start flinging accusations at the House. He has an idea, and almost doesn’t say it, but, “Now it’s your turn not to get mad.”

“Okay,” he says instantly. Which, what? Okay then.

He rubs the back of his neck, and says, “It – it wouldn’t hurt. If you would – maybe consider opening the Potter House? You don’t have to live there, or anything, or let anyone go inside, and it would mean officially being recognized as an heir, although you can probably stave off the Lord bit, I think. But you might not. You _can_ renounce it even, and if you do it properly it would actually help things. People don’t like change, usually, but it’s better than just ignoring it. You know?”

Potter stares at him for a long moment, stone faced and silent, and just, great, one step forward and a dozen steps back, as usual. He shouldn’t have said anything, and now telling his snakes to maybe give Potter a chance is going to be a lot more awkward now that they’re back to barely being on speaking terms.

“The Potter House?” he says. “Do you mean in Godric’s Hollow?”

He blinks. “What? No. That was just – a house that your parents lived in. I mean, normally Lords and Ladies are expected to live in their ancestral homes, but there was a war on and everything. Exceptions can be made.”

“I was told my family’s property and belongings had been destroyed during the war,” he says. “Wouldn’t that include whatever ancestral home the Potters might have had?”

It’s a good thing Draco’s sitting down for this conversation, because he feels a little faint. “No, it – no. Your family and mine have an alliance. Or, well, had, I guess. Our families mutually agreed to ignore it during the war, and then there was no one left to change the status of that. But your ancestral home is in Wiltshire. It’s not destroyed. It’s just locked up.”

“Okay,” Potter says, and this has to be a huge shock for him, but he just rolls back on the ball of his feet, and says, “Okay. So, I have a house. Why would unlocking it make me a lord if I’m not one already?”

If Draco was in Potter’s shoes, he’d need a minute or so to process this at least, but okay, they can go straight to the practicalities. “You’re not a lord because you’re the last of your family, and you were made the last of your family when you were a baby. A baby can’t become a lord. So, when that happens, everything – kind of gets put on hold. In stasis. Until such a time that the child is grown and ready to move on. Your family didn’t lock up the house before they went into hiding, they didn’t need to, it has just as many wards as the manor does, so anyone without the appropriate magical signature that was there without permission would just get killed, which would make it a great place to hide during the war, but only if they planned to stay there and never leave until it was over, which they didn’t. It locked _itself_ up the day your parents died. So, you’re the heir, but only – only in theory. Because it’s all still on hold, or in stasis. Only you can break that, and move forward, or move on. If you want.”

Potter is frowning, and Draco has no idea what he’s thinking, or what he’d be thinking in his place. “Okay,” he says finally. “I don’t know what I’ll do with it. But sure. It’s my family’s home, and I want to see it, if nothing else. How do I do that?”

“You just need blood, which you have,” he says. “Maybe bring along some people just in case anything nasty is waiting for you inside, but I think it should be fine. Bring Neville, and maybe Hermione. Ron too, for safety.” Not that Draco thinks he’ll need it, but he could probably use the friends. There aren’t many things that are more depressing than going through his dead family’s home that’s been empty for over two decades. It’s not something that anyone should do alone.

Potter nods and swallows, then turns to face him fully. He opens his mouth, closes it, then says, “Will you come too?”

All Draco can do is stare. What?

“Please?” he tacks on, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

“If you want me,” tumbles out of his mouth before he can stop it. Seeing Potter look uncertain like that makes his stomach turn. “But why?”

“So if there’s anything nasty in there, I can feed you to it,” he answers.

Draco laughs more out of relief than anything else. How has this conversation turned – not serious or tense even, just – heavy. It feels heavy. “Sure, Potter, if that’s what you want. It’ll give me a chance to pop over to check on the manor. At this rate, Hermione is going to be there more often than I am.” She’d taken his invitation and ran with it. She was rather cross that the library wouldn’t let her take out more than one book at a time, so she’d taken to spending long evenings reading there instead, and then taking whatever book she hadn’t finished.

Potter’s smile slides off his face. He leans forward on the desk, and there’s still a good foot of space between them, but now they’re much closer than Draco thinks is wise. “One more thing,” he says, and Draco can’t help but notice his lips are chapped, which is ridiculous. They have salves for that, or spells, they are wizards after all. Why is he walking around with chapped lips? “You don’t have to. But could you call me Harry? You call everyone else by their first name, and you don’t seem to mind that I call you Draco. So, you should call me Harry.”

Dangerous, dangerous, dangerous. This whole thing is dangerous, and if Draco’s not careful, he’s going to fall right off the edge into something terrifying and forbidden, something he can’t have no matter how much he wants it, just like he did when they were kids. Absolutely not. He can’t do that, it will only make the rest of it so much worse.

“Okay, Harry,” he says, still looking up at him, still with only a foot of space between them.

His grin lights up his whole face, and this isn’t the worst decision Draco’s ever made, but it certainly feels like it’s up there.

He can’t quite bring himself to regret it though. Not while Harry is smiling at him like that.

~

Draco has set up an interactive map of his Slytherin’s class and practice schedules, and there’s about an hour after dinner in two days where it looks like they’re all free. He can use that to give his speech about maybe facing their problems instead of slithering around them, which is going to go terribly. He could hold it tonight and just demand they all show up for a half hour regardless of what they’ve got going on. But they’re going to be angry anyway, he doesn’t need to start this meeting with them pissed at him for interrupting quidditch or whatever club they’re in.

Milly appears next to him with a crack. “Heir Longbottom is here for you, Master Draco.”

“Now?” he says, glancing at the clock. It’s not quite midnight yet, but it’s still far too late for anyone to show up at his door. Except Luna, who treats the passage of time like it’s an intellectual curiosity rather than something she’s expected to live her life by. He’s shocked she manages to arrive to her own class on time, although he suspects that has more to do with Hermione than any sense of punctuality of urgency his cousin may have developed.

Milly blinks. “Yes, Master Draco.”

That was almost something that could be considered sarcasm. She must be hanging around Dax. “Well, let him in, I guess.”

She’s gone with a crack, and Draco waves his wand to open his bedroom door so that Neville can find him rather than going out to meet him. He’s still looking at the student schedules. Something here seems off.

“Draco!” Neville shouts. He ignores him. It’s a straight line from his front door to his bedroom, it’s not like he can get lost. “Draco, I know you’re here, what are you–”

He assumes from the increase in volume and the footsteps that Neville is standing behind him. “Yes?”

“Nice use of the copying and projection charm,” he says, apparently distracted from whatever he came in here yelling about. “I’m going to use this, it’ll be much easier to keep track of the plants feeding schedules this way. Pomona just has a hundred different alarm spells, and she knows what they’re all for, but I don’t.”

“Sure,” he says. “You know, my farms use an alarm system and enchanted parchment, so the ones that need attention start flashing. One of my herbologists managed to charm it so it sends a howler if anything goes more than an hour without being fed. I promoted her for that.”

“I want that spell,” Neville says, glaring, and Draco cracks a grin. “But that’s not why I’m here. The Potter House is still standing?”

“Obviously. It’s only been locked up for what, twenty years? The Weasley Manor is still standing just fine, and that’s been locked up for three centuries.”

Neville rolls his eyes and says impatiently, “Yes, well, we can still _see_ the Weasley Manor, but there’s nothing where the Potter House used to be. I just assumed it collapsed in on itself when James and Lily Potter died. So did my grandmother. It would hardly be the first.”

He has no idea what conversation they’re having. “The Potter house is still there, clear as day. The grounds are overgrown, of course, but that’s only to be expected.”

They keep looking at each other in confusion, because they’re both certain they’re right. But Draco has seen the Potter House with his own two eyes, he can still sense the magic it gives off. It’s definitely there.

Neville’s eyes widen, and he hits himself on the forehead. “Your family had an alliance with the Potters!”

“So?” Draco says. “You don’t need an alliance to go see someone’s property. Anyone can stroll up to the Malfoy Manor for a look. They can’t cross the property line, but they can see it.”

“Yes, but your manor wasn’t put in an emergency stasis triggered by the death of the last adult wizards in your family,” Neville points out. “Who else had an alliance with the Potters?”

Okay, maybe Neville is onto something. It at least explains why someone would have told Harry that it was destroyed, when it clearly wasn’t. “The Ollivanders and the Prewetts. Maybe the Fawleys.”

Alliances were usually either matters of business or marriage, not just getting along. The reason the Malfoy and Potter families had and alliance wasn’t because they liked each other, but because they’d been doing business together since before the Potters came over from India, and since before the Malfoys came over from France. Once they were on the same soil, an alliance just made sense. The Malfoys grew it, and the Potters sold it. Even as their business models and the businesses themselves changed, they still kept up the alliance.

The Potters’ alliance with the Ollivanders was due to business as well, what with them being wand makers and the Potters being merchants, but the one with the Prewetts was because of marriage. Their fringe family members had intermarried enough that they’d set up an official alliance about two hundred years ago. Which was probably why everyone spent years speculating that Harry was going to marry one of Molly Weasley nee Prewett’s children.

They Fawleys dealt in magical creature trading, so it would make sense for the Potter’s to have a business alliance with them, but Draco can’t remember off the top of his head if they actually did.

Neville has a strange look on his face. “Do you think – if we’re right, and houses under emergency stasis disappear to everyone but those they’re allied with, that maybe there are still houses and land out there that we thought were lost, but aren’t?”

Ancient ancestral land, ancient ancestral homes, all hidden from view. “Even if they were, we wouldn’t be able to get in, we’d just get killed.”

“Probably,” Neville agrees, even though there’s no probably about it, they would just die. “But aren’t you curious? Don’t you want to know if they’re there? Come on, let’s go to the House. All the ancestral homes are recorded, we can see what ones went missing. Maybe they’re still there!”

“Right now?” Draco asks, appalled. “It’s midnight!”

“They invented pepper up potion for a reason,” he says cheerfully, tugging on the back of Draco’s robe like a child. “Come on, let’s go. It’ll only take a couple of hours.”

This is insane, and hardly pressing. But Neville’s right. He is curious. “Fine, but we have to go get Hermione. I promised to take her to the House’s library, and if she finds out we went without her, she’ll set us on fire.”

Neville shivers, because Draco’s right and he knows it. “Yeah, okay, that’s fair.”

He doesn’t have a morning class tomorrow, which is clearly going to be a good thing. He’s pretty sure this is going to take more than a couple hours.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hope you liked it!
> 
> feel free to follow / harass me at: shanastoryteller.tumblr.com
> 
> i post writing updates in my 'progress report' tag if that's something you're interested in keeping track of :)


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